in North- Easter 71 America. 



15 



Nortli American farmer. This is well understood now by the 

 leading promoters of agricultural improvement both in the United 

 States and in the British Colonies. But in tliis district of 

 Western New York they feel the influence upon local prices of 

 the great importations of wheat and flour from the new States 

 west of Lake Erie. The tide of this commerce in grain has now 

 turned in direction. Instead of sending westward from Buffalo its 

 tliousands of barrels of flour, as it did in former years, New York 

 now yearly receives from the west, through the same port, its 

 hundreds of thousands of casks of flour and of bushels of wheat. 

 So that, besides the improvements which the advance of know- 

 ledge suggests, self-interest is now urging the farmer of New 

 York to the adoption of wiser and better modes of culture. 

 " What," said the President of the Oswego Agricultural Society, 

 in his address at the close of 1850 — " What, I ask, is to meet 

 this competition of the west, but greater skill and care in the 

 mode of agriculture ? " This is precisely the language which 

 speakers and writers in our own country have of late years been 

 almost daily addressing to British farmers.* 



Nos. 5 and 6. The Helderherg Limestones and Sandstones (5), rise 

 immediately behind the Onondaga salt group. Where I drove 

 along the edge of this limestone with Mr. Geddes it formed a 

 high escarpment, from which the view of the flat lands below, 

 and of the country towards the lake, was beautiful and extensive. 

 Though far from what it was half a century ago, this great stretch 

 of undulating plain still seemed strange and savage to an eye 

 accustomed to the finished and artificially picturesque appearance 

 of an English landscape. Swamps and lakes, and rude natural 

 forests, with intervening tracts of land under waving corn, remind 

 the spectator how much nature yet rules, how long human in- 

 dustry must patiently labour still before the asperities of a new 

 country can be rubbed off, how many generations of the enter- 

 prising men who now possess it must still toil and adorn this 

 fine land before it will smile at their feet like that which their fore- 

 fathers left. 



At this limestone the natural richness of the country as a 

 wheat region begins to fall off. The soil upon the limestone 

 itself, and upon its subordinate sandstone, is often thin, resting on 

 a hard rock, but, where it happens to be deep, it is full of frag- 

 ments of limestone, and is of excellent wheat-growing quality. 



The Marcellus Shale (6), which overlies the Helderberg lime- 

 stone, is thin, varying from a few feet in thickness to a maximum 



* Those who are interested in the wheat-producing capabilities of the United 

 States generally, and in their future relations to our own wheat markets, will find 

 the subject discussed at some length in the 13th and 25th chapters of the author's 

 ' Notes on North America.' 



