222 
REVIEW OF PROFESSOR JOHNSTONS TRAVELS. 
"We must confess to a feeling of revulsion on meeting it ii 
at the very threshold of our author. s' 
He met with “ a preacher at the Episcopal church o 
in Nova Scotia, with a nasal twang so perfect that he \ 
guessed he must be a Yankee, but was afterwards c 
mortified to learn he was a native of New Brunswick.” j 
He need not have travelled out of England to find any 
reasonable number of nasal preachers, and sing-song r 
orators. He subsequently confesses “ that the general 1 
rudeness of the people, (Yankees,) which travellers c 
speak of, is not perceptible in New England generally.” t 
No, nor elsewhere, generally, when the traveller mani- £ 
fests the first rudiments of a gentleman in his inter- i 
course with them. We object to the discourtesy thrown i 
upon the country by the general reputation alluded to, i 
as if it had any other origin than in the conceit of vul- £ 
gar hireling scribblers. We distrust either the intellect t 
or feelings of a man who entertains the idea, that a na- 1 
tion which has given the exalted evidences of civilisation 5 
exhibited by this couutry, should be characterised by 1 
general rudeness of manners. Rude people and vulgar, i 
we have, and in sufficient numbers, but they are not < 
the mass; and their violence, whenever manifest, is < 
generally aroused by aggressive qualities of the same < 
stamp in those with whom they may come in contact, i 
We thank him for his hearty commendation of “the 1 
American Agriculturist and Albany Cultivator, those : 
really well and usefully got up papers, filled with val- ' 
uable information,” and we hope our countrymen will : 
not fail to appreciate them as highly. 
Mr. Johnston is as great a stickler for the inviolabil¬ 
ity of language, as his almost namesake, the great Eng¬ 
lish lexicographer himself, and deprecates all new mean¬ 
ings of words ; yet he has several times used the word 
“ wage ” for wages, which we should have attributed 
to the carelessness of American compositors, had his 
volumes been printed on this side of the Atlantic, in¬ 
stead of an English press of scrupulous exactness, and 
directly under the eye of the author. We have an 
“unspringed farm wagon,” p. 112 vol. 2 ; and “the 
northerns,” for northerners sounds oddly to an Ameri¬ 
can ear. What are “ self-contained houses,” we have 
not the skill to discover. The word “ progressed ” is 
used in its very Worst form, on p. 439, vol. 2. 
Mr. Johnston says, that at the New-York State Ag¬ 
ricultural Show, held at Syracuse, in 1849, “nearly all 
the cows exhibited were Devons, and a beautiful De¬ 
von bull in the yard, had been bred in Canada.” There 
were also a great many very beautiful bulls that were 
bred out of Canada ; and as to the cows, we venture 
the guess, that not one in every twenty exhibited had 
a drop of, (visible,) Devon blood in her veins: This is 
of very little consequence, as are numerous other mis¬ 
statements ; but when one speaks ex cathedra he should 
speak ex vero —if authoritatively, then truly. 
The fertility of the green sands of New Jersey, Mr. 
Johnston attributed to the presence of nodules of phos¬ 
phate of lime, a conjecture we have long entertained as 
alone being capable of accounting for their great fertilis¬ 
ing properties. He subsequently made an analysis which 
showed that certain specimens contained from one to 
one and a half per cent, of phosphate, sufficient to tell 
with wonderful effect on vegetable growth when asso¬ 
ciated as it always is, with an abundance of soluble 
potash. 
We hope to find room hereafter, for some interesting 
remarks on the blue crystals of phosphate of iron in 
New Jersey, in p. 210 , and his observations on the so¬ 
cial inferiority of the farming population of this coun¬ 
try, p. 471 of 2 d vol. There are some valuable sug¬ 
gestions scattered through the work, such as the re¬ 
marks on the comparative qualities of the different va¬ 
rieties of corn, pages 152, 154, not new, to be sure, but 
useful; “ the nature of the rock over which the apples 
grow, as effecting the flavor of the cider made from 
them,”Ac. We should say the soil in which they grow, 
which is frequently totally diverse from the underlying 
stratum. Here is a fact of value to scientific agricul¬ 
ture : “ I have caused an analysis of the green shale 
from which the soil of Mr. Decides’ farm is formed, (in 
Onondaga Co., N. Y.,) and found it to contain 28 per 
cent, of carbonate of lime, and 13 per cent, of carbonate 
of magnesia,” and yet, in this strongly calcareous soil, 
more lime, in the form of sulphate, or gypsum, (also to 
be met with in great abundance in the vicinity,) is 
found to be most highly efficacious. The red clays of 
New Jersey are also shown to be most beneficially in¬ 
fluenced by plaster, when somewhat remote from the 
sea. 
Many of our readers will be surprised to learn that 
“ with all the fame and natural capabilities of this fine 
western region of New York, the Empire State does 
not, according to the best information I could obtain, 
produce wheat enough for its own inhabitants.” His 
impression" that British farmers have little to fear 
from the wheat growers of North America, east of the 
head of Lake Ontario ” fully accords with our own; and 
speaks trumpet-tongued to our farmers, that they must 
rely on something besides wheat, or any other agricul¬ 
tural products, to pay for the enormous quantities of 
British and other foreign manufactures we are now im¬ 
porting. 
Mr. Johnston has very properly sifted our loose and 
exaggerated Patent-Office Reports, and shown the in¬ 
credibility of many of their estimates- and statements. 
But he has gone beyond any of these in his own un¬ 
derstating of the aggregate packing business of the 
: west, where a few emporia are made to represent the 
i total of the states. He alludes to our recent discove¬ 
ries of large quarries of phosphate of lime, both in New 
5 Jersey and Essex Co., New York. He thinks this sub- 
- stance may be advantageously exported to England, 
l and if so, it is certainly most deserving of repeated and 
thorough trials at home. 
There is a wholesome reproof administered to Amer- 
- ican grass sowers in the following: “The neglect of 
s grass seeds may be considered as a fair indication of a 
- low state of practical husbandry, in every country 
