A family-text book for the country

Front matter

A FAMILY-TEXT BOOK FOR THE COUNTRY ;

BEINO

A CYCLOPAEDIA

Preface

It is the design of the author, in all his labors for rural localities, to improve the mind as well as the soil. Indeed, such labors for the fornaer will ultimately prove of more benefit than those having exclusive reference to the latter. If the one is duly promoted, the other will follow in its wake. Whenever a rural population becomes imbued with a well cultivated literary taste and a love of science, there need be no apprehension that agriculture will be neglected, or that it will fail to be duly appreciated. Rarely will the soil receive a defective culture, except from the ignorant and the illiterate.

It has sometimes been thought by farmers that a book, having particular reference to their vocation, is necessarily filled with oxides and silicates, or with sulphates and phosphates ; that the mental food of the scientific agriculturist i-s a compound of caustics and volatilized poisons ; and that his very breath and clothes are so impregnated with carbonates and alkalies, that they cannot approach him without experiencing a kind of suffocation. Misapprehensions of this sort must be removed. Prejudices of this nature must be overcome. If not, the treasures of chemical knowledge will do little in renovating the soil. On the contrary, sterility will increase, till the wand of desolation passes over the broad earth. We labor to overcome these obstacles — to progress in rural economy.

To this end we connect, in a book for a rural population, with the topics more immediately interesting to the husbandman, brief sketches of political economy. What is better calculated to awaken attention in the producers of wealth, than to be taught the channels in which it is made to flow ? And, we connect with them brief sketches of natural history and domestic economy. Is there nothing in these to cast a charm upon his hitherto dreary pathway? Is there nothing in these to impart bright and cheering gleams amidst the dark shadows of his monotonous and wearied life ? The records of animal and vegetable physiology are the gems of our best literature. There is a richness in them found nowhere else. Compared with them other records are insipid. The same laws which regulate the growth of farm animals, regulate the growth of all animals spread over the wide creation, whether of tiny or gigantic dimensions. The same laws which regulate the vegetable tissues of the farmer's garden and grass fields, regulate the lofty trees, the magnificent foliage, and the rich fruita of the tropics. All these are kindred subjects. Is it no rational source of jy PREFACE.

inquiry at the festive table and the social circle of the farmer, to know •whence came our tea and our coffee, our sugar and our spices, and indeed the hundred other articles, foreign as well as domestic, that enter into human food ; or, of the hundred different vegetable tissues, from all climes, that enter into the constituency of human apparel ; or, of the hundreds of mineral and vegetable substances that enter into the various arts of life ? If subjects like these do not awaken the dormant energies of the mind, it is difficult to tell what will do it.

A better book than this, on the same plan, might possibly be made. Possibly we might have made a better one. If so, it would doubtless be difficult to satisfy the public that our reason is good for not doing it. We are not quite satisfied with that reason ourself. However, we have some grounds of justification. Even doing what we have done was a mental and physical toil exceeding the prudence every one should exercise in regard to the preservation of his own life and health. Our voyage on the ocean of life has already been somewhat long. Our bark has been deeply laden, and sometimes feebly manned. And, above all, we have sometimes had stormy weather. Hence to keep the ship in order, the hull well trimmed, the deck well swept, and the sails well set, has left but little time to make fanciful observation and embellishment. Such a mariner has but little leisure for his log book, or to look at the stars — to watch their transits, their declinations, or their ascensions. To leave our tropes : it is sufficient to say, that during the present winter, in addition to a general out-door supervision on the farm, and to writing for a dozen periodicals, the present volume is the firstborn of a twin progeny, for which we must assume the paternity. The only mitigation in the responsibility lies in the fact that more than one half of this one was prepared several years ago, and has not, perhaps, received the thorough revision, which a longer experience could have given it.

Men of enterprise and energy are under the guidance of destiny or Providence. They are carried forward whither they had not dreamed. They make their own pathway, without landmarks, before them. Others follow in their track, and those possessed of sufficient genius sometimes embellish the fabric devised for them. They are welcome to do it, so far as our hasty productions can be made available to public utility. None have but a temporary proprietorship in the avails of the mind or of the soil. Both, at short intervals, are to be merged again and again, successively, to the end of time, in the common joint stock for all the successive members of the human family. It is the duty of each one to add to this stock all in his power ; and, on the other hand, not to waste any of it, and to use as little of it as practicable for his own individual convenience.

J. L. B.

Nbw Yoek, March 20th 1862