.1862.] 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
239 
pour boiling water on onion seed. The vitality 
of some seeds is preserved by water. The bulb- 
lets of tlx q Lemma (Duckweed), always remain 
from Autumn until Spring, in the bottom of 
shallow ponds, and if carried into deep water, 
and then should sink below the warming influ¬ 
ence of the sun’s rays, instead of rising to the 
surface and germinating, might remain for years, 
and still retain them vitality. The lsnardia palus- 
tris , an aquatic, growing in the bottom of streams 
of water, will flourish equally well if the stream 
happens to change its course and leaves the plant 
on dry ground. The Hibiscus mosclieutos I have 
frequently transplanted from the borders of lake 
•Erie into dry ground, and it has uniformly 
flourished, as well as in its native marsh. And 
so of scores of other plants. 
We know that seeds will produce plants. It 
has been demonstrated ten thousand times be¬ 
fore our eyes. But that they have ever been pro¬ 
duced in any other way, since the formation of 
the first specimens, described by Moses as the 
third day’s work of the Creation, /have no evi¬ 
dence for believing. To depend upon an “ orig¬ 
inal principle in the soil ” for a crop of weeds 
even, I should consider a very uncertain affair. 
I sow the seed, believing, with Paul, (II. Cor. ,xii. 
28) that “ God giveth to every seed his (its) own 
body.” But if flie soil produces plants without 
seeds, it can be proved. Institute a thorough 
examination, with magnifying glasses of high 
power, when the thing first starts into being. 
Trace it down to the “ center of motion,” and if 
there is absolutely no cotyledon, none of the es¬ 
sential organs of a seed, then write under the ex¬ 
amination Q. E. D. Discrptmus. 
Little Mountain, Ohio, June 1862 
Tim Bunker on the Cost of Pride. 
“Father, have you seen the Agriculturist?” 
asked Sally, as she handed her second baby to 
her mother and the paper to me. I had been to 
the post-office that afternoon, and had not had 
a chance to look at it, even if I had been in the 
house long enough to do it. This is generally 
the way; the women have the first cut. I have 
known Mrs. Bunker to leave a batch of dough 
she was mixing to read the paper, and that I 
guess is about the last thing a house-keeper 
ought to leave, especially if the yeast is good. 
You see it so happened that Sally and her 
children came over from Shadtown that after¬ 
noon, to make us a little visit. She has always 
been good about coming home, and since John 
has been gone to the war we have seen more of 
her than usual, which is very thoughtful in her. 
“Well no, I haven’t. What is in the wind now ?” 
“ Just read what a Western Farmer says about 
your taking lessons in spelling. You see you 
get great credit for my correcting your letters ?” 
“ Credit, girl! The man is poking fun at me 
for writing out of character. I knew it would 
come to this, if you and the printers didn’t let 
my spelling alone.” 
I have never, told the public what lots of 
trouble I have about these letters, being a mod¬ 
est man, and not caring to push my private 
matters into notice. Folks are so awful proud 
now-a-days that everything has to be fixed up 
before it can show itself, from a baby’s dress to 
a President’s proclamation. They even find 
fault with Lincoln’s State papers, because the 
rhetoric isn’t quite tall enough, and .the gram¬ 
mar don’t always break joints.. I’m expecting 
nothing else but they’ll get out a new edition 
of the catechism, and our children will be 
taught “The chief end of man is. to fix up.” 
You see in the . first place I didn’t want to 
write at all, considering that I understood the 
use of a plow enuff sight better than the use of 
the pen, and remembering that old. saw “ Let 
the cobbler stick to his last.” I still think there 
is wisdom in that saying. But you see the edi¬ 
tor thought I had better write, that I ought not 
to hide my light under a bushel, and all that 
sort of thing. He was very civil in his compli¬ 
ments, and what was I that I should set ran for 
knowing more than an editor, and the editor of 
the Agriculturist , too? I thought he ought to 
know what sort of talk would edify farmers, and 
I didn’t pretend to be any thing else. So I 
promised him that I would write for one year, 
and have kept on ever since. 
Then Mrs. Bunker didn’t want me to write ; 
’twould make a public man of me, and 
folks would come to stare round the house, as 
if they expected to see a lion in his cage ; lion¬ 
izing I believe she called it, and I suppose that 
was about what she meant. 
Then Sally put in agin’ my writing; said she 
should be ashamed to have my letters to her 
printed, because the spelling was awful. She 
admitted the sense was good enuff, about equal 
to any thing they had in boarding school, but 
the grammar and the spelling wanted fixing. 
So I had to tell her if the spelling didn’t suit 
her, she might fix it to suit herself. For my 
part I couldn’t see why it wasn’t just as well to 
spell words as they sounded, as to follow the 
dictionary. I thought plow was about the same 
tool, whether they spelt it with a w or ugh at 
the end; one was considerable shorter than the 
other, and would save ink; besides, every body 
would know what I meant, and that was the end 
of talking or writing, to be understood. But I 
couldn’t convince her by any common sense ar¬ 
guments, that my spelling was good enuff. 
So “Western Farmer,” and the public will see 
that my ideas have to go through about as much 
grinding and fixing before they come to light, as 
a bag of wheat does before it comes on to the 
table in the shape of bread. Sally must have 
her say, and the editor his, and the printer puts 
in the stops and pauses; so that by the time my 
ideas get back to me in the paper, I don’t hardly 
know them. Some of them look as if they had 
been to college, and some to boarding school, 
and some brought up on a farm. But I take it 
the sense is understood, which is the chief thing. 
There is one thing I don’t exactly understand, 
why they should put in what Jake Frink says, 
and Uncle Jonathan, and the rest of them, just 
as I write it, and practice their fixing up on me. 
I talk for all the world just like Seth Twiggs, 
but Sally says that is the vernacular,, and don’t 
look well in print. Perhaps it don’t. Tastes 
differ. I don’t think it pays for altering. In 
my opinion Sally had better mind her babies 
than to be tinkering with my spelling, and I 
guess the public would understand my writings 
quite as well if the printer didn’t spend so much 
time on the commas and exclamation points. 
Why, any fool would know when a question was 
asked, without the sign. They say they keep a 
fellow in the printing office at about $3 a day, 
just to tend to this kind of tinkering. I don’t 
think it pays; but that is none of my business. 
This pride shows itself everywhere, and is 
about as troublesome on the farm as in the city. 
I am afraid it will be the ruin of the nation yet. 
It seems to grow worse the longer I live. It 
costs me a great, deal more to live than it did my 
father, and if John ever gets back alive from the 
war, he will never be able to live in the simple 
way I have done. Pride costs more than all 
other necessary family expenses. It has made 
many a man a bankrupt, and it keeps a good 
many of my neighbors poor. Every thing they 
earn is spent upon their backs, or upon or¬ 
namenting and fixing up their houses and 
farms. Farming is a good business, and pays 
all decent demands upon it, but it will not 
support much pride. A fence that costs a dol¬ 
lar a rod will turn cattle just as well as a 
faced wall of hewn stone, costing twenty 
times as much. The nineteen dollars extra 
goes to the support of pride, and farming 
ought not to be expected to foot the bills. A 
barn that will shelter hay and cattle, is just 
as good as one costing four times as much, fin¬ 
ished as elegantly as a dwelling. Farming will 
not pay for the clapboards, the lath and plas¬ 
tering, the ceiling and varnish. If a man has 
made a fortune in trade, there is no objection to 
his building a country seat, and living like a 
prince. His profits will support his pride. But 
the profits of ordinary farming will not justify 
a like expenditure. He may keep, if he will, a 
servant to each member of his family, but a 
farmer must serve himself. When he gets above 
his business he had better leave it. It strikes 
me that a farmer’s pride ought to run to his bus¬ 
iness, rather than to his walls, and buildings. 
Other folks have to have dwellings, barns and 
fences, and it is no great shakes to own good 
lumber and paint. But farmers only have a deep 
rich soil, fine wheat and corn fields, and luxu¬ 
riant meadows. It will pay for a farmer to cure 
a horse-pond, to drain a swale, or to turn a bar¬ 
ren pasture into a meadow that will cut three 
tuns of hay to the acre. It will pay for him to 
raise fine horses and cattle, pigs and sheep. 
He ought to gratify his pride in the line of his 
calling, and not undertake to rival merchants 
and nabobs. If he fixes up his fields and breeds 
good points in his stock, people will not trouble 
themselves very much whether he says cow oi 
Jceow , or attends spelling school late hr life. 
Hookertown , ) Yours to command, 
July 15th, 1862. \ Timothy Bunker, Esq. 
[Squire Bunker’s, like the rest of our corves 
pondence, has to go through the mill.— Ed.] 
Book Farming. 
We sometimes meet with farmers who deride 
book-learning as useless, yea, as even hurtful to 
the interests of agriculture. Give us experience, 
they say; that is enough, and that is safe. We 
know one farmer in particular, a shrewd, keen 
man, who learned his calling from his father be¬ 
fore him, and who still learns much by visiting 
his brother agriculturists; but he has a mortal 
prejudice against book-farming. Probably, 
much of what he knows and prides himself on 
knowing, is really the product of scientific study 
by bookish men. If many of the useful methods 
which he practises had never been disseminated 
through books, perhaps neither he nor other 
farmers would ever have knowm them. 
When a man has learned something really 
useful, (no matter how he learns it,) why should 
it not find its way into print for the benefit of 
others? But no—oh no! for then it would be¬ 
come book-farming. Some one lias likened 
such a narrow-minded man to the great Omar, 
who said of the books in the Alexandrian Li¬ 
brary, “ If they contain only what is in the Ko¬ 
ran, they are not needed. If they contain what 
is not in the. Koran, it must be false. Let them 
be burned.” So, if papers and books contain 
only what he knows, they are useless ;• if they 
contain anything he does not know, they must 
be false, and should be discarded, if not burned- 
