130 
COUNTY AGRICULTURAL SOCIETIES. 
race-horse cultivation, such ceaseless and indiscriminate extor¬ 
tion as we practice upon them, and which distinguishes the 
agriculture of this country from that of any other country in 
the world. Not fifty years, indeed, will elapse, if our present 
system be pursued, ere fields that are now seemingly in- 
exhaustable, and which, every season, groan with-the weight of 
matchless harvests, will he so sterile then as hardly to produce 
a weed. Those worn-out and deserted plantations which one 
may see in almost every county of Virginia and North Caro¬ 
lina, will eventually find their parallel even in the rich valleys 
of the West. That day, it is true you may not see it, nor I ; 
but, if our farmers continue to war on Nature and against 
every law of science, as many of them have done and still do, 
that day, like a ghostly famine, will surely come aud cause 
your children to regret a bitter doom. Now, no man has a 
right by ignorant and ruinous tillage, thus to destroy the fer¬ 
tility of the soil, to abuse the ground—God’s heritage to man 
—and thereby doom his posterity to poverty and slavish drudg¬ 
ery. It is barbarous, it is knavish—sinful. How much bet¬ 
ter, nobly to wed science to his labors ; to learn the secret of 
farming without rendering his fields a desert; to transmit his 
farm every way as productive as when the plow first broke its 
surface ; to inform himself by diligent study, of those eternal 
laws of nature, which, governing alike the vast orb and the 
minutest atom, go down and regulate the production of every 
plant, tissuing its fibres and breathing the vital sap through its 
pores, and the mandates of which even to the smallest particu¬ 
lar, it is ruinous to disobey. Yes, let the farmer patronize 
Science ; let him learn both Philosophy and Theory, as well 
as the Practice of his profession ; and thereby alone can Agri¬ 
culture, the first of arts, be elevated and sustained to that 
noble dignity which God and Nature intended. 
There is but one more requisite to which I may, in conclu¬ 
sion, refer, and to which I invite your special attention : that is 
—The Farmer should love his calling and continue at it through 
life. If there is a man who should be proud of his profession, 
