Competent American travellers concur in the opinion that the Europeans
generally, and especially our brethren of England, Ireland, and
Scotland, are far in advance of us in scientific and practical
agriculture. This has been stated or admitted by Mr. Colman, President
Hitchcock, and last by Mr. French, who has recently visited Europe under
the auspices of the National Agricultural Society.
There are good reasons for the past and for the existing superiority of
the Old World; and there are good reasons, also, why this superiority
should not much longer continue. Europe is old,--America is young. Land
has been cultivated for centuries in Europe, and often by the same
family; its capacity tested, its fitness or unfitness for particular
crops proved, the local and special effects of different fertilizers
well known, and the experience of many generations has been preserved,
so as to be equivalent to a like experience, in time and extent, by the
present occupants of the soil.
In America there are no family estates, nor long occupation by the same
family of the same spot. Cultivated lands have changed hands as often as
every twenty-five years from the settlement of the country. The
capacity of our soils to produce, when laboriously and systematically
cultivated, has not been ascertained; there has been no accumulation of
experience by families, and but little by the public; and the effort, in
many sections, has been to draw as much as possible from the land, while
little or nothing was returned to it.
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