dred of his generations come and go, leaving the earth and its living vesture essentially as they found it. 3. But let civilized man replace him for a bare life-time, and he leaves footprints that centuries will not efface. Our Atlantic seaboard has hardly been known to civilized men for four generations; yet, if these were to be swept away to-morrow, and the wilderness untrodden by human foot were here to resume its ancient sway, more memorials of these four generations would challenge attention and reward inqui'ry two thousand years hence than we can now discern of all the races that peopled this Atlantic slope prior to the voyages and discoveries of Columbus.' 4. The rigors of winter, and the experienced perils of starvation during its reign, gradually impel the savage to save and stōre the grains and fruits of the seasons of plenty to subsist him through the dearth which regularly follows; and he slowly learns to preserve and tame the animals best calculated to serve him by draft or as food. The grains which habitually grow and ripen on the fertile intervales of streams which annually overflow their banks, ultimately teach him to increase their quantity and render their reproduction more certain by cultivation. To plant the seed in the most promising localities, and take the chance of its reproducing its kind ten or twenty-fold, is his first essay: necessity impels and experience gradually teaches more methodical and efficient cultivation. The loss of cattle by cold, by storm, by hunger, at length suggests the curing of fodder for winter use and the provision of such shelter as the climate may seem to require. 5. The supply of food being thus doubled and trebled, population increases correspondingly; and thus is created a necessity for a still more thorough and effective tillage of the soil. Thus pressed by want or a justified apprehension of it, man slowly learns to deepen his culture, to fertilize his fields, to diversify his implements, and improve his methods, until the labor of one produces adequate sustenance for many, and ever-enlarging conceptions, wants, capabilities, achievements, enjoyments, expand his intellect, refine his nature, and exalt his aspirations. 1 Christopher Colum'bus, the discoverer of the New World, was born in Gen'oï, about the year 1435, and died at Seville, Spain, May 20th, 1506. His remains now repose in the cathedral of Havana. His increased power over nature is the genèral measure of his progress from the lowest barbarism up to that perfect mental and moral stature which is symbolized by Copernicus,' Galileo,' Shakspeare, Milton, and Newton. 6. Modern agriculture is an art-or rather a circle of arts— based upon natural science, which is a methodical exposition of divine law. The savage is Nature's thrall, whom she scorches, freezes, starves, drowns, as her caprice may dictate. He lives in constant dread of her frosts, her tornadoes, her lightnings. Science teaches his civilized successor to turn her wildest eccentricities to his own use and profit. Her floods and gales saw his timber and grind his grain; in time, they will chop his trees, speed his plow, and till his crops, as well. 7. Science transforms and exalts him from the slave into the master of the elements. If he does not yet harnèss the electric fluid to his plow, his boat, his wagon, and make it the most docile and useful of his servants, it is because he is still but little advanced from barbarism. Essentially, the lightning garnered in a summer cloud should be as much at his command, and as subservient to his needs, as the water that refreshes his thirsty fields and starts his hitherto lifeless wheels. 8. Agriculture, as it steadily rises from the low level of barbarism to the commanding altitude of a true civilization, becomes a mōre and more intellectual calling. The rude pioneer, wrestling stubbornly with the giant forest or the inhospitable marsh, may waste half his time in play or idleness; but his work, when he does work, is purely muscular, making no draft on mental power or culture. His fields are subdued and tilled, his crops produced and secured, almost wholly by dint of the strength in his good right arm. But, for his civilized, enlightened descendant and successor, all this is changed. Water, wind, steam, supply the needed power; his task is to mold and guide that power to beneficent' ends. 9. In my boyhood, the man who cut an acre of heavy grass did therein a good day's work, which taxed his physical energies to the utmost, and sent him weary and exhausted to bed, to rise stiff and sōre for the morrow's duties; now, any intelligent, resolute girl of fifteen, guiding a span of horses, may cut five acres of just such grass before noon, cut it better than the best mower ever did, and alight from her seat on the mowing machine untired and eager for a pic-nic or frolic after dinner. Steam saws wood into fuel for the kitchèn fire-place and the parlor stove; cuts stalks and straw into half-inch pieces and then cooks them into a pulpy mass; slices roots; churns cream into butter without supervision; and is just harnessing itself to the plow, resolved to pulverize the soil more rapidly, more cheaply, to a greater depth, to a more equal and perfect comminution, than it has ever been possible to attain by the force of animal power. 10. Manifestly, we stand but on the threshold of the new age whereof steam is at once the harbinger and the impulse; but enough has been developed to assure us that more and better is at hand. Nor should we doubt that steam itself is the forerunner of agencies still more potent and more cheaply efficacious. Mighty as have been its achievements, they only serve to render more obvious and làm'entable its limitations. 11. Of the power actually generated by the vaporization of water, I can not say how great is the share utilized by an ordinary steam-engine, but I believe the estimates of scientists all range below twenty per cent. Then the enormous weight of boiler, fuel and water, that must be transported with every form of locomotive, absorbs nearly half the power not squandered by imperfect devices for directing and applying it. Mighty as steam assuredly is, it is not only a blind giant, but we are deplorably blind with regard to its economy and adaptation. 1 Be něf' i cent, charitable; good. ? Com`mi nu' tion, the act of re ducing to fine powder or small particles; pulverization. 12. And why should steam, even in its best estate, be final? Intelligence has already spurned its trammels; thought has far outstripped it in the invention and operation of the magnetic telegraph; why should the wondrous power we have evoked' in electricity be limited to the transmission of ideas? Why may it not be employed to impel material substances as well? True, we have not yet learned how to transmit the power unquestionably generated by electricity; but our average ignorance and incapacity, resulting in obstruction and defeat, are constantly overstepped and transfigured by the men of genius and of prescience whom God benignantly sends to lead us on from achievement to achievement, from triumph to triumph. 13. To be conscious of a need or a deficiency, is to be far on the way whereby we shall at last overcome it. Steam, as a productive force, an industrial factor, is barely a century old; electricity was harnessed to a wire and made a postboy hardly thirty years ago. I do not believe this all, nor even the best, that this all-pervading, irresistible power is destined to do for us. I believe that plants will yet be grown by its aid with a celerity never yet attained; that heat will be profitably produced and diffused by its agency; and that power will be generated from electric batteries, of old or new device, which will supplement, if not in time supersede, all other mechanical forces, liberating man almost wholly from obstruction and defeat by material obstacles, and rendering productive industry a matter of application and oversight, rarely or never taxing human sinews to achieve a result which invokes the employment of material force. V. 48. AGRICULTURE. PART SECOND S agriculture a repulsive pursuit? Is That what has been called farming has repelled many of the youth of our day, I perceive; and I glory in the fact. An American boy, who has received a fair common-school education and has an active, inquiring mind, does not willingly consent merely to drive oxen 'Evōked', summoned ; called out. 'Presciɔnco (prē' shi ens), knowl edge of events before they take place; foresight. and hold plow forever. He will do these with alacrity, if they come in his way; he will not accept them as the be-all and the end-all of his career. He will not sit down in a rude, slovenly, naked home, devoid of flowers, and trees, and books, and periodicals, and intelligent, inspiring, refining conversation, and there plod through a life of drudgery as hopeless and cheerlèss as any mule's. He has needs, and hopes, and aspirations, which this life does not and ought not to satisfy. This might have served his progenitor in the ninth century; but this is the nineteenth, and the young American knows it. 2. He needs to feel the intellectual life of the period flowing freely into and through him-needs to feel that, though the city and the railroad are out of sight, the latter is daily bringing within his reach all that is noblèst and best in the achievements and attractions of the former. He may not listen to our ablest orators in the senate or in the pulpit; but the Press multiplies their best thoughts and most forcible expressions at the rate of ten to twenty thousand copies per hour; and its issues are within the reach of every industrious family. 3. Any American farmer, who has two hands and knows how to use them, may, at fifty years of age, have a better library than King Solomon ever dreamed of, though he declared that "cf making of many books there is no end;" any intelligent farmer's son may have a better knowledge of Nature and her laws when twenty years old than Aristotle' cr Pliny ever attained. The steam-engine, the electric telegraph, and the power-press, have brought knowledge nearer to the humblèst cabin than it was, ten centuries since, to the stateliëst mansion; let the cabin be careful not to disparage or repel it. 2 4. To arrest the rush of our youth to the cities, we have only to diffuse what is best of the cities through the country; and |