AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST 
18 
WHAT THE FARMER MOST NEEDS. 
It is not a college endowed by the state, says 
a contemporary ; it is a primary school, to pre¬ 
pare farmers sons and daughters for the higher 
walks in science as applied to agriculture. They 
need organization. They want farmers’ clubs 
and neighborhood libraries of agricultural books. 
They need discussion. They need more inter¬ 
course, not only in their own town and county, 
but throughout the State and country, to see 
and learn what other farmers are doing, and 
adopt. This is the greatest need of farmers. 
They need to become satisfied with-their avoca¬ 
tion ; to get rid of' the prevailing notion that 
farming is, necessarily an unmental employ¬ 
ment. The farmer is accustomed to think that 
he has no occasion for education, and never 
can become wealthy, or what the world calls 
respectable, while engaged in the culture of the 
earth, and therefore he seeks the first opportu¬ 
nity to escape from an avocation, placed under 
ban, not only by all others, but by his own 
class also. The great need of the farmer is that 
he shall declare himself independent of all 
classes; at least more so than they are of him, 
and is entitled to engage in any other calling 
whatever, and if he is a man of toil, that is no 
reason why he should not be a man of intellect. 
The great need of a firmer is organization, and 
this must be accomplished by a few self-sacrific¬ 
ing men, who will undertake the labor of estab¬ 
lishing and maintaining farmers’ clubs in every 
neighborhood. Farmers need not drop politics 
to take up agriculture. They must talk, read 
and think.— Vermont Statesman. 
-• • •-- 
The Process of Coining Gold. —A United 
States mint has been completed in San Fran¬ 
cisco, and is probably ere this time in active 
operation, coining downMaity vast treasures of 
golden ore. It was intended that it should be 
prepared to coin thirty million dollars yearly. 
The following description of the system which 
is about to be established there, will afford a 
good general idea of the ordinary process of 
coining gold: 
The metal, after being received in the deposit 
room, is carefully weighed and a receipt given. 
Each deposit is then melted separately in the 
melting room, and moulded into bars. These 
bars next pass through the hands of the assayer, 
who, with a chisel, chips a small fragment from 
each one. Each chip is then rolled into a thin 
ribbon, and filed down until it weighs exactly ten 
grains. It is then melted in a little cup made 
of calcined bone ashes, and all the base metals, 
copper, tin, &c., are absorbed by the porous 
material of the cup, or carried off by oxydation. 
The gold is then boiled in nitric acid, which dis¬ 
solves the silver which it contains, and leaves 
the gold pure. It is then weighed, and the 
amount which it has lost, gives the exact pro¬ 
portion of impurity in the original bar, and a 
certificate of the amount of coin due the depos¬ 
itor is made out accordingly. 
After being assayed, the bars are melted with 
a certain proportion of silver, and being put 
into a dilution of nitric acid and water, assume 
a granulated form, In chis state the gold is 
thoroughly boiled in nitric acid, and rendered 
perfectly free from silver or any other baser 
metals which may happen to cling to it. It is 
next melted with one-ninth its weight of cop¬ 
per, and thus alloyed is run into bars, and de¬ 
livered to the coiner for coinage. The bars are 
rolled out in a rolling mill until nearly as thin 
as the coin which is to be made from them. By 
a process of annealing they are rendered suffi¬ 
ciently ductile to be drawn through a longitu¬ 
dinal orifice in a piece of steel, thus reducing 
the whole to a regular width and thickness. A 
cutting machine next punches small round 
pieces from the bar about the size of the coin. 
These pieces are weighed separately by the 
“ adjusters,” and if too heavy are filed down— 
if too light they are re-melted. The pieces 
which have been adjusted are run through a 
milling machine, which compresses them to 
their proper diameter and raises the edge. 
Two hundred and fifty are milled in a minute 
by the machine. They are then again softened 
by the process of annealing, and after a thor¬ 
ough cleaning are placed in a tube connecting 
with the stamping instrument, and are taken 
thence one at a time by the machinery, and 
stamped between the dies. They are now 
finished, and being thrown into a box are de¬ 
livered to the Treasurer for circulation. 
The machinery, of course, for all these pro¬ 
cesses, must be of the nicest kind. The weigh - 
scales alone, in the deposit room of the Cali¬ 
fornia Mint, cost $1000.— Boston Weekly Jour¬ 
nal. 
- « © » - 
Horses in Cincinnati.— We have endeavored 
to ascertain the extent of trade, the number of 
horses sold in this market per annum, and are 
certain that the result will astonish those who 
are not acquainted with the market. There are 
in Cincinnati three horse auction establishments 
and four principal drover’s and sale stables. 
The auctions are on Fifth, between Main and 
Sycamore; on Fifth, Sixth, and Vine, are pro¬ 
prietors of drovers’ and Boarding stables, where 
horses are sold at private sale every day in the 
year. 
During the last year the number of horses 
sold at auction stables named, was nine thou¬ 
sand three hundred and sixty. It is estimated 
by men familiar with the market, that an equal 
number are annually sold at the drovers’ stables 
and at private sales elsewhere in the city. This 
would give us an aggregate of nearly nineteen 
thousand annually sold in this market.— Com¬ 
mercial. 
Selfishness. —Live for some purpose in the 
world. Act your part well. Fill up the mea¬ 
sure of duty to others. Conduct yourselves so 
that you shall be missed with sorrow when you 
are gone. Multitudes of our species are living 
in such a selfish manner that they are not likely' - 
to be remembered after their disappearance. 
They leave behind them scarcely any traces of 
their existence, but are forgotten almost as 
though they had never been. They are, while 
they live, like one pebble lying unobserved 
amongst a million on the shore; and when they 
die, they are like that same pebble thrown into 
to the sea, which just ruffles the surface, sinks, 
and is forgotten, without being missed from the 
beach. They are neither regretted by the rich, 
wanted by the poor, nor celebrated by the 
learned. Who has been the better for their 
life? Who has been the worse for their death? 
Whose tears have they dried up ? — whose wants 
supplied?—whose miseries have they healed? 
Who would unbar the gate of life, to readmit 
them to existence?—or what face would greet 
them back again to our world with a smile? 
Wretched, unproductive mode of existence! 
Selfishness is its own curse; it is a starving 
vice. The man who does no good gets none. 
He is like the heath in the desert, neither yield¬ 
ing fruit nor seeing when good cometh — a 
stunted, dwarfish, miserable shrub. 
- «©• —— 
Baby Show in Canada. —A correspondent 
of the Burlington Free Press gives an amusing 
account of a baby show in Bytown, Canada, on 
the 2d inst. The prizes were $60 each to the 
three largest, fattest, and handsomest babies in 
the town of March. There were but two ba¬ 
bies presented, one 16 and the other 17 months 
old, each of whom received a prize. After some 
appropriate speeches by the judges, one of the 
lucky mothers made the announcement that 
“ she would have another baby to show at the 
same time and place next year, if there was a 
premium to be given,” which caused rounds of 
applause. 
-♦ » •- 
A Washington clergyman, whilst stating a 
deficiency in the collections, remarked that since 
the issue of three cent pieces, the revenue of his 
church had decreased nearly one half. 
-... -.. - .. * - m- 
The Ox that Wouldn’t Stay Killed. —A 
farmer drove a very fat ox to market, expecting 
the animal when killed would yield some twelve 
or thirteen hundred of beef. He sold the ox ; 
the buyer drove him off, and at night came back, 
representing that the animal had been slaught¬ 
ered and offered to settle for him, but showing 
an account of his weight that fell short of the 
expectations of the farmer, who insisted on 
seeing the beef, and after weighing it with the 
tallow, he was forced to go home, though not 
half satisfied, with the money in his pocket. 
During the night after his return, the dead ox 
came back to his yard alive and well, having 
broken out of the butcher’s enclosure; and the 
next day the farmer drove the same ox back to 
town, and offered to sell him to the same 
butcher, w r ho having missed the animal, eyed 
the new T comer rather suspiciously, and conclud¬ 
ing that he it was who had been sold, bought 
the ox at a lumping price, and paid for him this 
time. 
-• 6 •- 
Velocity of the Wind. —Professor Stoddard, 
in a lecture recently delivered on the hurricane, 
in Knox county, Ohio, stated that in one town 
a grove of oak trees was almost entirely blown 
down. The trunk of one of these trees was 
about three feet in diameter. Assuming, how¬ 
ever, its diameter to be but two and a half feet, 
a force of 147,000 pounds would be required to 
break it. The surface of the tree exposed to 
the action of the wind was about 1000 feet, 
which would give a pressure by the wind of 
147 pounds per square foot, or a velocity of not 
less than 171 miles per hour, which is nearly 
one-fourth the initial velocity of a cannon ball. 
Allowing the height of the hurricane, or whirl¬ 
wind, to have been sixty feet, the whole force 
exerted at one time along its track was five 
thousand million pounds, or working power 
equal to more than half the steam power of the 
globe. 
-« 9 »- 
A Kentucky Hunter. —Wat Eckman has fol¬ 
lowed hunting for a livelihood since the year 
1831. Since that period, he says, he has killed 
thirty-eight bears, nine hundred and eighty-four 
wolves, three thousand eight hundred and forty- 
seven coons, nine hundred and ninety foxes, 
nine hundred and sixty one wild geese, two 
thousand and forty pheasants, forty-four ground 
hogs, eighty wildcats, fourteen polecats, two 
hundred mink, besides squirrel, quail and other 
small game be} r ond his power to calculate.— 
The sum he has realized from his game, skins, 
&c., falls but little short of twelve thousand dol¬ 
lars.— Evansville Journal. 
- • © « — - 
A Lama Turn Out. —A late Paris paper in¬ 
forms us, that a singular “turnout” was seen 
in the Bois dc Boulogne recently. It was in the 
“Allee du Prado,” where a young American 
girl was sporting about, drawn by two fine 
lamas , as large as donkeys, and harnessed up 
like horses. The gait of these animals, though 
not so fast as that of the French half-breeds, 
appeared to be good enough, and was remarka¬ 
bly regular. They carried their heads capitally. 
As this was the first appearance of an estab¬ 
lishment of the kind in Paris, it created quite a 
sensation, and the riding and driving gentry in 
the Bois crowded about it to enjoy the spectacle 
more closely. 
Cattle for California. —Over 3000 head 
of cattle have been driven from the counties of 
Crawford, Sebastian and Scott, in Arkansas, 
this season, for California; as also large droves 
from other frontier counties and the Cherokee 
Nation. Captain Deinckla, at Port Gibson, is 
to leave in a few days with 1800 head. 
—-® © o- 
Ambitious. —One of our exchanges tells us of 
a lazy genius up his way, who being asked, as 
he lay sunning himself on the grass, what was 
the height of his ambition, replied : “7b marry 
a rich widow that's got a cough." 
