700 THE SOUTHERN PLANTER. [November 



to have their vocation on a level with 

 others ; why they should feel proud to have 

 no paper, while every pursuit is fond of 

 having one. 



Those who are prejudiced against book- 

 farming are either good farmers, misinform- 

 ed of the design of agricultural papers, or 

 poor fanners, who only treat this subject as 

 »they do all others, with blundering igno- 

 rance. First, the good farmers ; there are 

 in every county many industrious, hard- 

 working men, who know that they cannot 

 afford to risk anything upon wild experi- 

 ments. They have a growing family to 

 support, taxes to pay, lands perhaps on 

 which purchase money is due, or they are 

 straining every nerve to make their crops 

 build a barn, that the barn may hold their 

 crops. Th^y suppose an agricultural paper 

 to be stuffed full of wild fancies, expensive 

 experiments, big stories made up by men 

 who know of no farming except parlor- 

 farming. They would," doubtless, be sur- 

 prised to learn that ninety-nine parts in a 

 hundred of the contents of agricultural pa- 

 pers are written by hard-working practical 

 farmers I that the editor's business is not 

 to foist absurd stories upon credulous read- 

 ers, but to sift stories, to scrutinize accounts, 

 to 'obtain whatever has been abundantly 

 proved to be fact, and to reject all that is 

 suspected to be mere fanciful theory. Such 

 papers are designed to prevent imposition ; 

 to kill off pretenders by exposing them ; 

 to search out from practical men whatever 

 they have found out, and to publish it for 

 the benefit of their brethren all over the 

 Union; to spread before, the labouring 

 classes such sound, well-approved scientific 

 knowledge as shall throw light upon every 

 operation of the farm ; the orchard and the 

 garden. 



The other class who rail at book-farming 

 ought to be excused, for they do not treat 

 book-farming any worse than they do their 

 own farming; indeed, not half so bad. 

 They rate the paper with their tongue ; but 

 cruelly abuse their ground, for twelve 

 months in the year, with both hands. I 

 will draw the portrait of a genuine anti- 

 book-farmer of this last sort. 



He plows three inches deep, lest he 

 should turn up tlie poison that, in his esti- 

 mation, lies below ; his wheat-land is plow- 

 ed so as to keep as much water on it as 

 possible ; he sows two bushels to the acre 

 and reaps ten, so that it takes a fifth of his 



crop to seed his ground ; his corn-land has 

 never any help from him, but bears just 

 what it pleases, which is* from thirty to 

 thirty-five bushels by measurement, though 

 he brags that it is fifty or sixty. His hogs, 

 if not remarkable for fattening qualities, 

 would beat old Eclipse at a. quarter race; 

 and were the man not prejudiced against 

 deep plowing, his hogs would work his 

 grounds better with their prodigious snouts 

 than he does with his jack-knife plow. His 

 meadow-lands yield him from three quar- 

 ters of a ton to a whole ton of hay, which 

 is regularly spoiled in curing, regularly left 

 out for a month, and very irregularly stack- 

 ed up, and left for the cattle to pull out at 

 their pleasure, and half-eat and half-tram- 

 pled underfoot. His horses would excite 

 the avarice of an anatomist in search of 

 osteological specimens, and returning from 

 their range of pasture, they are walking 

 herbariums, bearing specimens in their 

 mane and tail of every weed that bears a 

 bur or a cockle. Rut, 0, the cows! If ( ? 

 held up in a bright day to the sun, don't 

 you think they would be semi-transparent ? 

 Rut he tells us that good milkers are al- 

 ways poor ! His cows get what Providence 

 sends them, and very little beside, except 

 in winter, then they have a half-peck of 

 corn on ears a foot long thrown to them, 

 and they afford lively spectacles of anima- 

 ted corn and cob -crushers — never mind, 

 they yield, on an average, three quarts of 

 milk a-day ! and that milk yields varieties 

 of butter quite as astonishing. 



His farm never grows any better, in 

 many respects it gets annually worse. Af- 

 ter ten years' work on a good soil, while 

 his neighbours have grown rich, he is just 

 where he started, only his house is dirtier, 

 his fences more tottering, his soil poorer, 

 his pride and his ignorance greater. And 

 when, at last, he sells out to a Pennsylva- 

 nian that reads the Farmer' & Cabinet, or 

 to some New Yorker with his Cultivator 

 packed up carefully, as if it were gold, or 

 to a Yankee with his New England Far- 

 mer, he goes off to Missouri, thanking 

 Heaven that he's not a book-farmer ! 



Unquestionably, there are two sides to 

 this question, and both of them extreme, 

 and therefore both of them deficient in 

 science and in common sense. If men 

 were made according to our notions, there 

 should not be a silly one alive ; but it is 

 | otherwise ordered, and there is no depart- 



