DEVOTED TO AGRICULTURE AND ITS KINDRED ARTS AND SCIENCES. 



VOL. XIII. 



BOSTON, JANUARY, 1861. 



NO. 1. 



yoURSE, KATOV & TOLMAV, Proprietors. ^^j^cfn tirowm -PDTTnR 

 Office.... 34 Meucuants' Row. SIMON BROWN, EDITOR. 



FRED'K HOLRROOK, ) Associate 

 HE.VKY F. FRENCH, \ Editors. 



CALENDAR FOR JANUARY. 



"Time speeds away — away— away — 

 Another hour — another day — 

 Another Month — another Year — 

 Drop from us like the leaflets sere. 



"Time speeds away — away — away — 

 No eagle through the sliies of day, 

 No wind along the hill can flee, 

 So swiftly or so smooth as he." 



ANUABY First, An- 

 no Domini, Eigh- 

 teen Hundred and 

 Sixty - One. An- 

 other year, anoth- 

 er decade of years, 

 has slipped away 

 from us almost as 

 unconsciously as 

 the date has slip- 

 ped from our pen. 

 The year of our 

 Lord 1861, — a 

 mere point in the 

 cycles which have 

 rolled on since the 

 first man first felt 

 the mysterious influence 

 called life, and yet how 

 all important, how all-embracing it 

 seems to us. 

 We are apt to look upon the generations that 

 have been as only so many links in the chain 

 which reaches from the creation down to us. 

 "Why, Adam, Methusaleh, Noah, and all who have j 

 since existed, only prepared the way for the glori- 1 

 ous era of the nineteenth century. ' We forget I 

 that every man and every race has regarded him- 

 self and his times in precisely the same light as 

 the one point toward which everything else has j 

 tended. Little did Adam think of the use thej 

 Westminster divines were going to put him to, as 

 a hen-pecked husband and the author of evil to 



his race. He thought no more of us, than we do 

 of the people that are going to live six thousand 

 years hence, but supposed, as we do now, that 

 the world was made for him and his, and that he 

 had nothing to do but cultivate his farm quietly, 

 and bring up his children in the fear of God. Lit- 

 tle he thought of the Assembly's Catechism or 

 Milton's Paradise Lost. Methusaleh — Noah — it 

 seems strange that they never considered them- 

 selves in the light of antediluvians, while ice nev- 

 er think of them in any other light. Strange that 

 Methusaleh could not have answered a question 

 familiar to the smallest school-boy now. — "Who 

 was the oldest man ?'' 



Tt is hard to realize that our past was the "liv- 

 ing present" of someb ody else. We look at the 

 Egyptian mummies, who have risen from-' their 

 tombs and made their first voyage across the wa- 

 ters three thousand years after their death, and 

 have a complacent feeling that the great end of 

 their existence was to be embalmed, and" serve as 

 objects of curiosity to us, forgetting that they, 

 with blooming cheeks and beating hearts, chased 

 the same shadows that we are chasing'i|ow ! Even 

 the mastodon and the trilobite, those fossil re- 

 mains which the wise ones puzzle their heads 

 over, were once fresh creations, and rejoiced in 

 their new gift of life like a last summer's bee or 

 butterfly. But, surely, we think, Time has set his 

 foot down and is going to stop awhile. Not so.- 

 Still 



"Time speeds away — awaj- — away," v 



and in "the light of other days" we may be Noahs 

 and Methusalehs — perchance fossil remains of 

 extinct races ! But they wont carry our bodies 

 about for a show — we are too sharp for them 

 thei-e. No — the dust shall return id the earth a^ 

 it teas, and the spirit unto God who gave if. 



But how it humbles our pride to think that 'we 

 must share the oblivion which has fallen upon so 

 large a portion of our race. Imagine some future 

 wise man wandering over the ruins of Boston^. 



