INTENTION IN AGRICULTURAL ART. Invention in the processes simplifying agricul tural labor and art have scarcely kept pace with those applicable to manufactures. Nevertheless, within the last ten years, such notable improve ment in the adaptation of machinery to agricul ture has been made, that scarcely any farm labor need now be done by the direct application of manual labor. Even the pitching of hay by horse power is now fairly accomplished, thus taking off one of the most severe forms of labor with which the farmer has to deal. Wheel imple ments are now universally used in the place of the hoe in cultivating the kitchen garden, and in extensive market gardening the application of gang seeders and cultivators have been success fully used; one used by the writer, having been capable of cleaning twelve acres per day, with. three men and three horses, covering eighty inches of surface at every passage over the field. The modern mower, tedder, hay rake, loader, and stacker, leaves little to be desired in hay making. The grain fields are plowed with gang plows, seeded by means of drilling machines, and cut, gaveled and bound by one operation of the modern harvester. Corn land in the West
may be well prepared and cultivated at an out lay of less than the labor of a man and team working less than one and a half days per acre, leaving the field ready for the huskers. Roads are graded by machinery at the rate of it quarter of a mile per day, ditches are dug, and even tile laid by machinery. The threshing and cleaning of grain, and in fact all the principal labors of the farm are now so simplified, that what was once the most exacting drudgery is now not any more laborious than other industries. In dairy ing, invention seems to have been at fault in one respect. A perfect and practicable cow-milking machine has not yet been invented. A number have worked measurably well, but can not be relied on for constant use. Chemistry, however, has come nobly to the help of the dairyman, and in connection with modern apparatus for setting milk, making butter and cheese, has placed the dairyman now on an equality with other branches of husbandry.