33 



and appreciate tlio worth and dignity of la})or, 

 Avhother of the head or hands, or, what shouhl 

 always be the case, of both conjoined. 1 cannot 

 regard onr position as farmers to be hopeless, as 

 the fact is trnly enconraginii" that every improve- 

 ment made in agricultural mechanics — and such 

 improvements in this mechanical age are great j 

 and rapid — as this and similar exhibitions tes- 

 tify, necessarily tends to diminish the severity 

 and monotony of manual labor. Ploughing, for 

 example, with our modern aud improved imple- 

 ments, is quite a different thing from what it was 

 with the heavy and ill-constructed ones of thirty 

 or forty years ago ; and the threshing, reaping 

 and mowing machines, in the perfection to which 

 they have already been brought, reduce human 

 labor, as it were, to a minimum, and in great 

 measure relieve the husbandman of some of the 

 hitherto most laborious of his operations. 



The agricultural world seems certainly, if not 

 rapidly, adopting a new power in the cultivation 

 of the soil, nnd for diminishing manual and ani- 

 mal labor, that will form a new and striking 

 epoch in the history of the art. I refer to the 

 application of steam to fjirm work. The steam 

 plough has already obtained a firm footing in the 

 British Islands, and several European countrius, 



