ADAPTED TO THE 
IT arm, GrarcLexi, and. X: X on s e li o 1 d. 
AGRICULTURE IS THE MOST HEALTHFUL, THE MOST USEFUL, AND THE MOST NOBLE EMPLOYMENT OF MAN -WASHINGTON 
ORANGE JUDO, A. ML ., 
EDITOR AND PROPRIETOR, 
ESTABLISHED IN 1842, 
$1.00 PER ANNUM, IN ADVANCE. 
SINGLE NUMBERS 10 CENTS. 
VOL. XIX.—No. 2. 
NEW-YORK, FEBRUARY, 1860. 
UJF'OS'fice at 189 Water-st., (Near Fulton-st.) 
^Contents, Terms, Ac., on pages 60-G4. 
Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1880, 
by Orange Judd, in the Clerk’s Office of the District 
Court of the United States for the Southern District of 
New-York. |5pN, IS.—Every Journal is invited freely 
to copy any and all desirable articles with credit, and no 
reference will be made to our Copy-Right, wherever 
each article or illustration is duly accredited to the 
American Agricxdturist. ORANGE JUDD, Proprietor. 
'American Agriculturist in (German. 
The AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST is published in 
both the English and German Languages. Both 
Editions are of Uniform size, and contain, as 
nearly as possible, the same Articles and Illustra¬ 
tions. The German Edition is furnished at the 
lame rates as the English, singly or in clubs. 
February. 
“Earth robed in white a peaceful Sabbath holds, 
And keepeth silence at her Maker’s feet, 
She ceaseth from the harrowing of the plow, 
And from the harvest-shocking ; man should rest 
Thus from his fevered passions, and exhale 
The unbreathed carbon of his festering thought, 
And drink in holy health. As the tossed bark 
Doth seek the shelter of some quiet bay 
To trim its shattered cordage, and restore 
Its riven sails—so should the toil-worn mind 
Refit for Time’s rough voyage.” 
Mrs. Sigourney. 
It were a sad thing not to be in harbor at this 
inclement season, having all the ship gear snugly 
stowed, with rest and reflection marked out as 
the leading items of business. Every spar is 
sheeted with ice, the furled sails have every fold 
full of frozen sleet, and the deck is slippery as 
glass. Large icicles hang from the bowsprit, and 
a wreath of frost-work, beautiful as chased silver, 
girds the noble craft. There let her rest in win¬ 
ter quarters. 
A winter morning like this, which almost cur¬ 
dles the ink in the pen as v/e write, were worth a 
long journey to see, and our summer friends from 
the tropics, and from the sunny south, who come 
to spend “ dog-days ” and to drink ice-water with 
us, should stay over one season, and see the ice 
at its fountain head, our ponds, lakes, and rivers 
bridged with crystal, our forests jeweled with 
diamonds, and all the green fields of summer 
robed in purest white. What scenes of tropical 
vegetation, of broad-leaved evergreens, or cy¬ 
press woods festooned with funeral moss, grand 
as they are, can equa 1 our pine and hemlock for¬ 
ests, our mountain sides and summits, clothed 
with fir, and spruce, when the frost-king robes 
them in their winter array, and the morning sun¬ 
beams bring out the full beauty and grandeur of 
the scene. Every object in Nature wears a new 
aspect in these winter days. The brooks that 
sparkled and danced in the summer, are now 
stiffened into carved crystal, and glitter with the 
beauty r r still life. What artist could fix in stone, 
forms so beautiful as fringe the winter stream, 
the ice-clad rock, the grotesque shapes that guard 
the water-fall, the beaded grass and bushes, re¬ 
flecting all the hues of the rainbow 1 The sere 
brown fields of autumn are white as robes of ves¬ 
tal. The forests, bare of foliage, and deserted by 
the singing birds, awe the spirit by their silence, 
and invite to self communion and reflection. 
Yet there ate not a few upon the farm who 
think that the tiller of the soil has little occasion 
for reflection, or any other mental exercise. 
Others may drink at the fountain of knowledge, 
and hold communion with the living soul that 
animates all these material forms, and understand 
those lessons which God has impressed upon all 
the works of his hands. But these are not the 
things for the farmer to contemplate. They re¬ 
gard all the learning of the schools, beyond the 
simplest rudiments of education, as so much use¬ 
less lumber in the farmer’s mind. They have no 
objections to reading, writing, and ciphering, for 
these branches enable him to keep accounts, and 
to guard himself against the frauds of designing 
men. But anything more than this, the knowl¬ 
edge of the earth and its history, the grammati¬ 
cal structure of language, the studies which teach 
a man to think, and use his stores of knowledge 
already gained, they regard as a useless waste of 
time, and tending to unfit a man for the cultiva¬ 
tion of the soil. They would claim that schools 
are among the active agencies that are now de¬ 
populating the farm, and drawing our sons and 
daughters into other pursuits, already over¬ 
stocked. They believe that the cultivation of the 
soil is mainly a business of brute muscle, and 
that it matters very little whether more or less 
brains guide the hand of the laborer. The work¬ 
ing of this leaven is seen in the facts imperfect¬ 
ly brought out in our census returns, showing in 
one State over ninety thousand white adults, 
who can neither read nor write; in four other 
States over seventy thousand each, and in three 
others over sixty thousand each, and in the whole 
country nearly a million of this uneducated class. 
By far the larger part of these are upon the farm, 
and have grown up with the idea ruling in the 
minds of the parents, that education is useless to 
men and women who are expecting to earn 
their bread with their hands. 
Now it may be true that an unlettered laborer 
will lift as large a stone as he could do with a 
college education, that he can drive a horse or ox 
as well, and get as much labor out of brute mus¬ 
cles. But this does not prove that education will 
not help him in his business. A small part only of 
farm labor consists in dead lifts. The cultivator 
has many occasions every day in which skill will 
be worth more to him than strength, in the use 
of his own labor, as well as in directing the labor 
of others. It is undoubtedly true that education 
does beget a distaste for a certain kind of manu¬ 
al labor. The intelligent mind is not satisfied 
with this as an end. It craves the best results 
[NEW SERIES—No. 157. 
possible for every blow struck upon the farm. An 
adventurous Yankee, in a back settlement, was 
put to chopping wood with an old-fashioned 
tool, looking more like a tomahawk than an ax. 
When he found that he could not do a half-day’s 
work with it, he threw it aside in contempt, de¬ 
claring that money could not hire him to chop 
wood with such an implement. His mental cul¬ 
ture had unfitted him—not for manual labor—hut 
for an unskillful and unprofitable use of his mus¬ 
cles. Every blow that he struck, reminded him 
painfully of the better tool to which he was ac¬ 
customed, and with which he could do twice the 
amount of work. He wanted something more 
than wages for his toil. He wanted the work 
done in a manner profitable to his employer. 
And here, we apprehend, is the spot where the 
shoe pinches with the multitudes of our young 
men educated in our free schools. They have 
much better advantages for education than their 
fathers had fifty years ago, and their reading in 
books and journals keeps them in sympathy with 
the improvements that are constantly going for¬ 
ward in husbandry. The fathers want to keep on 
in the old routine methods, using nothing new bill 
what is forced upon them by necessity. The sons 
object to this continual waste of huma-n muscles, 
so long as they know a more excellent way. 
They can not he content with scratching the 
earth with an old-style plow and woojlen mold- 
board, four inches deep, when the same amount 
of human labor, with a deep tiller, would loosen 
the soil fourteen inches, and make a seed bed in 
which all crops would rejoice. It is a source of 
mental discomfort to use a hoe weighing five 
pounds, when with one pound of steel they can 
hoe more, and better. It goes against the grain 
to use the hand-hoe between the rows, where the 
horse-hoe will do the work of ten men equally 
well. They could endure the scythe and the cra¬ 
dle when there was nothing better with which to 
gather the summer harvest. But now that a 
span with a mower or reaper will do the work of 
a dozen hands, the old fashioned scythe is an in¬ 
strument of torture, and the July sun scorches 
like the breath of a furnace. The fathers are 
content with forty bushels of corn, or a tun of 
hay, to the acre. The sons know that these 
crops can be doubled without any greater tax 
upon the muscles. Labor is economised in mani¬ 
fold ways, and the boys, who have learned to ci¬ 
pher, see at a glance the difference between the 
old and the new methods of husbandry—between 
a bare living and an early competence or sub¬ 
stantial wealth upon the farm. If they can use 
their minds in the cultivation of the soil, and 
make their labor remunerative, they have no ob¬ 
jection to abide upon the homestead. But if a 
dogged conservatism rules the paternal acres, and 
work, irrespective of its reward, is glorified, ihe 
lads pack their trunks and seek a new field of la¬ 
bor—who can blame them 1 
It is a slander to say that learning has spoiled 
