INTRODUCTION. xi 



Statistics of agricultural implements produced in the United States during the year ending June 1, 1860. 



Value of, not represented in 1850. 



AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS. 



PROBABLY no exhibition of our national statistics is more important or satisfactory, than the fore 

 going tables showing the great increase and present extent, of the construction and employment of 

 agricultural implements and machinery. 



The high price of labor has stimulated mechanical invention. In no other country are there so 

 many cheap and efficient implements and machines for facilitating the labors of the farm. In older 

 and richer countries we find more expensive machinery, but, as a general rule, it is too complicated and 

 cumbersome for our use. We have been thrown on our own resources, and have no reason to regret it. 



Whatever augments the productive capacities of the soil, or increases the profits of labor and 

 capital employed on so large a scale, either in the first production or the subsequent handling of crops, 

 becomes a practical clement in the general prosperity. The vast power resident in machinery, even 

 the more simple applications of the mechanical powers, with their modern perfection of detail, gives 

 this creative force, which may be increased almost beyond computation by the use of steam as a prime 

 mover. Thus, every machine or tool which enables one farm-hand to do the work of two, cheapens 

 the product of his labor to every consumer, and relieves one in every two of the population from the 

 duty of providing subsistence, enabling him to engage in other pursuits, either laborious, literary, pro 

 fessional or scientific, practically duplicating at the same time the active capital or the purchasing 

 power nf the producer, thus enhancing the comfort of all and stimulating the common enterprise. 



When the utility of labor-saving appliances in agriculture shall come to be fully apprehended, and 

 made generally available in the clearing, draining, and tilling of the soil; in the planting, irrigating, 

 cultivating and harvesting of crops, and in their speedy preparation for market, wo may regard the 

 occurrence of famine, cither from deficiency of labor, as in time of war, or from the contingencies of 

 soil and climate, as practically impossible. Already has the use of improved implements, aided by 

 scientific and practical knowledge in all the processes of the farm, resulted like the use of machinery 

 in other departments of industry in such a diversification and increase of the forms of labor, and 

 such a cheapening of its products under ordinary circumstances, that we rarely hear of the unreasoning 

 and jealous violence of farm laborers, who in England, a generation since, wantonly destroyed all the 

 agricultural machinery of a neighborhood, even to the common drills, in the mistaken opinion that its 



