Notices of New Publication s e 
im 
she nineteenth century, worthy of their sires, and the 
country they inhabited. We need not add, for those 
who know him, that Prof. Hitchcock has executed this 
work in a manner that fully justifies the commission 
under which he acted. 
Bees, Pigeons, Rabbits, and the Canary Bird, 
familiarly described ; their habits, propensities and dis¬ 
positions explained ; mode of treatment, in health and 
disease, plainly laid down ; and the whole adapted as a 
text-book for the young student. By Peter Boswell, of 
Greenlaw. With an appendix, for the care of several 
American singingbirds. New York : Wiley & Putnam. 
—This is a reprint of a popular English.Manual on the 
above subjects; and it is written with judgment, close 
attention to the habits of the pet domestics therein de¬ 
scribed, and with much plainness and good taste in the 
style adopted. We shall make some extracts for the 
ivee things , in our Ladies’ Department, which will fully 
illustrate the character of the work. 
New Agricultural Work. —The Hon, Adam Beatty 
proposes publishing a work on practical agriculture, in¬ 
cluding his premium essays, which have been revised 
and prepared for the press, with explanatory notes. The 
volume will contain about 300 pages, duodecimo, on 
good type and paper. Price, payable when the work is 
delivered, $1. 
From the long experience of Judge Beatty as a farmer 
of the West, and his high character as an agricultural 
writer, we have no doubt that the work he proposes 
publishing, will be found both valuable and interesting, 
and we most cordially recommend it to the public. 
We have extracted the above notice from the Ky. 
Maysville Eagle, and we hail the determination of our 
highly esteemed friend, with unfeigned pleasure. We 
have had the satisfaction, and advantage too, of perus¬ 
ing the published and manuscript portions of this work, 
and are confident he cannot confer a greater boon on 
the inhabitants of the great western valley, than by its 
publication. Judge Beatty is a thoroughly practical, as 
well as scientific agriculturist; and his long experience, 
good judgment, and close and accurate observation, en¬ 
title his opinions on this subject to the fullest confidence. 
The first No. of the Berkshire Farmer and Gar¬ 
dener’s Magazine, published at Pittsfield, Wm. Bacon, 
editor, has been sent us. Old Berkshire, that has long 
been a brilliant star in the galaxy of agricultural im¬ 
provement, exhibiting in her annual fairs, which have 
continued for many years, as fine an array of product 
as any other in the country, is waking up to the neces¬ 
sity of enlisting the press in her behalf. The paper is 
well filled with judicious matter, and is likely to afford an 
important aid in developing her agricultural resources. 
We notice a long editorial article of our own, stray¬ 
ing uncreaited through its columns; the editor must jog 
the attention of the printer. 
The Southern Planter of Richmond, Va., 
we are glad to notice, has an accession to its 
editorial department in that devoted friend 
to agriculture, L. M. Burfoot, Esq., which we 
are sure will give increased interest to that 
useful and popular work. We find another 
Southern Planter among our exchanges, 
published at Natchez, Miss., and we would 
respectfully suggest, whether it would not 
be better, to avoid confusion, that another 
name be adopted for one of them. It is a 
good title, and we don’t wonder that our 
Southern friends are partial to it $ but “ a 
rose by another name will smell as sweet.” 
Old Agricultural Works .—Barnaby Googe, Esq. 
—It is amusing, as well as instructive, to look over some 
of the old writers on husbandry, and observe the crude 
and uncertain ideas and principles that possessed them; 
how blindly they went forward in their career as in¬ 
structors and guides, and how often, instead of teachers, 
they show the necessity of being taught themselves. 
The age of superstition had not then passed away: 
indeed, we may ask, is it yet entirely gone ? Jlye —gone 
from the high places, the academies and schools, from 
the minds of the learned and the wise, which it not un¬ 
frequent ly, most fully controlled within the last two cen¬ 
turies and a half. Demons and unseen spirits, hovered, 
in their bewildered imaginations, over the walks and 
destinies of man, guiding his footsteps for good, or 
balking them for evil; the air was filled with things 
strange and unnatural; a prophecy of peace and good 
fortune breathed in the gentle zephyr, and the direst ills 
that flesh is heir to, grated harshly on the ear, from the 
foreboding north or sullen eastern blast. Nature, to 
them, was a riddle, an unexplained, unfathomed mys¬ 
tery ; and, like the red man for the first time perusing 
a book, or an Esquimaux the incomprehensible ma¬ 
chinery of a watch, they laid hold of her in every direc¬ 
tion, and viewed her under every aspect; but their com¬ 
prehension of her subtle laws was more darkened by 
the investigation than ever. Bacon had not then arisen, 
an angel of light and life to the weary, misdirected and 
bewildered traveller, in his explorations of nature’s 
hidden labyrinths; and no mind could, with authority, 
prescribe where the broad line of demarcation ran, that 
separated truth from error. They knew that somewhere 
in the widened defile it lay; but the shadowy and fitful 
gleams of their brightest reason played so uncertain 
over the broad expanse, that wliat at one time com¬ 
mended itself to their minds as the clearest light of 
truth, was, a moment after, by some intervening cloud, 
passed over to the opposite side of uncertainty or error. 
Bacon, that landmark in the march of time, where the 
world pauses to contemplate the magnitude of its own 
inheritance when first discovered,—Bacon it was who 
first established the immutable and impassable lines be¬ 
tween what was known and certain, and what was yet 
to be proved and determined, in the visible and tangible 
things of nature’s operations. He taught this first and 
most obvious principle of action, but which, like the 
egg of Columbus, the world had not till then known how 
to adjust, to take no premises for granted, from which the 
unchangeable and eternal principles of truth were yet 
to be educed. Every step in the advancement of science 
was to be taken on firm, unyielding, impregnable ground. 
Conjecture, and the hallowed legends of monkish su¬ 
perstition, or the more stately and gorgeous trappings 
of philosophic error, were, by his giant hand, brushed 
from our vision, to admit the unobstructed light of truth. 
Henceforth and for evermore, the distinctions between 
the false and the real, were to be as distinctly known 
as day from night; and, though in the imperceptible 
gradations from one to the other, there is necessarily a 
point where neither daylight ends nor darkness begins, 
for which a brief space is willingly conceded, as yet 
doubtful and undefined, we can yet confidently say of all 
the rest, it has a place fixed and certain as the sun in 
heaven. 
It is not idly or vainly claimed for the present time, 
that all truth is known, that even more than a few rays 
of light are discerned in nature’s vast expanse. But 
what we claim for the wiser of this present generation is, 
