"Duchess of Geneva" brought the sum of $30,000, shows the high estimate placed upon Short-horns.

The present condition of agriculture in the Empire State is most flattering. Her scientists have diffused so much information respecting the laws of forestry, that the State is moving with unanimity to preserve a large part of the Adirondack mountain region, the forest feeder of her noble rivers, from further devastation. The preservation of natural pasturage will follow.

Among other recent industries, fish culture and fur culture deserve attention; the one for its novelty, the other for its immense importance. Trout raising has been made as certain and profitable as that of chickens and turkeys. The fur bearing animals have retired before civilization to such an extent that their extermination has been looked upon as probable. In 1867, Mr. Rassigue, of Oneida County, New York, commenced the rearing of minks, which can be done anywhere, all that is needed being a constantly flowing spring, and a small plot of ground. They breed rapidly, are subject to no diseases, and are worth from five to eight dollars a head, when grown.

The development of the dairying interest in the United States would require a volume for its full explanation. Mr. X. A. Willard, to whom it owes so much, stated, little more than a year ago, that American dairying represents a capital of more than $1,000,000,000.

The cheese product in 1872 sold for $30,000,000, and the butter product for $200,000,000.

Nine years ago, the first cheese factory was established in Oswego county; now, there are fifty. In one town are five factories, which work the milk of 2,200 cows. One of them made over 200,000 pounds of cheese. The number of cows in the county has increased from 10,000 to 30,000, under the stimulus of coöperation and association; each cow representing in herself, including land for keeping, factories, implements, and fixtures for marketing, a capital of $300, making a total investment of $9,000,000 in the dairy agriculture of the county. The average product of cheese per cow does not exceed 350 pounds in a season. Many dairies make an average of fifty pounds of butter per cow, also. Two hundred pounds of butter per cow is considered a good yield for butter dairies. Mr. L. D. Arnold, before the New York Dairymen's Association, thus states his views upon the future of dairy husbandry:

CONSUMPTION OF BUTTER AND CHEESE.

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"At the present rate of increase of population in the United States, the year 1900 will find us with 100,000,000 of inhabitants. If we continue to consume cheese at no greater rate than at present, it will require two and a half times the quantity that we now consume; or 450,000,000 to supply the annual home consumption. The shipping demand must also increase. Nothing but a war with England can prevent it. The English are a cheese-eating people, and are now using twice as much per head as we do. Nor is that rate of consumption likely to be abated. It is the readiest and cheapest way to supply the laboring man with animal food, as it contains twice as much nutrition, pound for pound, as meat; while more pounds of cheese than meat can be produced from a given quantity of feed. The population of England is increasing, while her cheeseproducing capacity is not. Germany supplies her with what we do not; and, as no other European country produces any quantity for export, the increasing wants of England must be supplied from the United States. If we continue to consume cheese at the present rate, and England also, the increase of population will require for the year 1900, not less than a billion pounds!"

Then there is the butter interest, larger still. We export but little butter, but we consume three and a half times as much as we do of cheese, varying from thirteen to seventeen pounds per head per annum. I have often heard dairymen predict a high reward for dairy products in the future, especially for cheese, because the demand was so rapidly exceeding the limited capacity of the dairy districts of the country. The State of New York is more exclusively devoted to dairying than any other State in the Union, but only a small portion of the State is accredited as being good dairy land.

Pennsylvania has so nearly the same natural advantages and manufacturing interests as the State of New York, that her agriculture has developed in a similar manner, though without as many vicissitudes. The Keystone of the "Old Thirteen,' Pennsylvania has been the mother of the States upon her western boundary; she attracted the first, and has been the theatre of the most successful attempts at foreign colonization. The Friends, the Swedes, the Moravians, the Mennonites, and various other religious sects, have assisted in giving a peculiar character to her institutions, while the superiority of her soil,

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and the industries growing out of her mineral wealth, have maintained the balance of power most certain to secure prosperity.

The

New Jersey is the market garden of two great thriving cities, and fruit and vegetable-growing has there attained the greatest perfection. A blackberry grower, in West New Jersey, with seventy-five acres in cultivation, realized therefrom a net profit of $14,000. The cranberry has proved one of the most profitable crops. Sixty acres, in bearing, have netted over $13,000. Cranberry lands have brought $1,000 per acre. agriculture of New Jersey has been created by facilities of transportation; waste lands are being rapidly reclaimed, and her growth is steady and continuous. Sixty-six per cent. of all the land in New Jersey is improved in farms, whose average value per acre is $86 14; the largest of any State in the Union. Delaware and Maryland deserve more extended notice than our brief limits will allow. They are fast coming to be the garden spots of America. The peach crop of these States is immense the average net profit of the crop of 1871, was seventy-five cents per basket. A peach farmer of Middletown, Delaware, cleared $38,000 from four hundred acres. The "Peach Blossom Farm," in Kent County, Maryland, contained six hundred acres of trees just coming into bearing, and was sold in winter for $31,500. The same year the purchaser sold peaches enough from it to amount to $52,000. One canning establishment in Dover, Delaware, consumed in 1873, of peaches, 18,000 bushels; of pears, 2,000 bushels; of tomatoes, 480 tons; of strawberries, 30,000 quarts; of cherries, 30,000 pounds.

In all these States, the advancing condition of agriculture is largely due to the influence of education and the press. The most influential journals-and those not especially devoted to this subject-maintain an extensive correspondence, and give considerable space to the treatment of matters of agricultural interest, at home and abroad.

INCREASE OF MAIZE CULTURE.

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CHAPTER VII.

FARMING IN THE WESTERN STATES.

"Consumption is the crown of production, and the wealth of a nation is only to be estimated by what it consumes."-John Ruskin.

THE WORLD'S GRANARY-RELATIVE VALUE OF CORN AND WHEAT-STOCK FARMING VS. WHEAT FARMING-IMPROVED IMPLEMENTS: TRIAL OF AMERICAN MACHINES-MISSOURI, TENNESSEE AND KENTUCKY-CALIFORNIA AND OREGONAGRICULTURE OF THE CATHOLIC MISSIONS-JOHN GILROY AND HIS NEIGHBORS--LARGE WHEAT FIELDS--ENORMOUS CROP OF 1872--MARKET FOR CALIFORNIA WHEAT--FARMERS NOT ENRICHED BY THIS STREAM OF WEALTH--TONNAGE: PRICES--CALIFORNIA THE CENTER OF WINE AND WOOL PRODUCTION.

PASSING the great lakes, the emigrant farmer found a country awaiting him, where Providence, in the abounding conditions of prosperity, to use the language of one of their number, had not only "smiled, but laughed outright." A sea of verdure richer and more luxuriant than the meadow lands of the Connecticut or Genesee, dotted here and there with park-like, natural plantations of oaks, indicated lands for the plow, and sites for the homestead. Priceless in prospective value, it came almost without price into the hands of the settler. A season's labor in breaking the strong sod of the prairie, made it ready for wheat, secured him against want, and in the possessory right to the soil. The winters were not more severe, though a little more open than those of the northern sea-board. The northern belt of States, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, soon poured a silver stream of wheat into the granaries of the world; Ohio, Illinois, Indiana and Missouri, also wheat growers to a considerable extent, contributed a golden stream of corn, the noblest product of the new world. Up to the year 1800, the export of American corn had only exceeded, by a trifling amount, two million bushels. This crop is first set down in the census of 1840, at three hundred and seventy-seven million five hundred and thirty-one thousand eight hundred and seventy-five bushels; in 1850, it covered thirty-one million of acres, and yielded six hundred million bushels; in 1860, it amounted to eight hundred and thirty-eight million seven hundred and ninety-two thousand seven hundred and forty-two bushels, the export being worth ten million dollars,

The ease and certainty with which the farmer may provide

for his live stock in winter, through the great productiveness of maize, has made pork raising one of the most important features of western agriculture. The State of Iowa reports many fields which produce as high as one hundred and five bushels of Indian corn to the acre. In the year 1872, over two and a half millions of acres were devoted to this crop, which covered one fourth of all the land in cultivation, and the supply was so greatly in excess of the demand, that large quantities of it were used as fuel; corn at eighteen cents a bushel being cheaper than wood at eight dollars and fifty cents per cord. In the year 1872, Illinois raised the enormous quantity of two hundred and seventeen million, six hundred and twenty-eight thousand bushels of corn. It is very important that the farmer should understand the relative value of corn and wheat, and how a surplus of either affects the market. The increase in. the production of corn always brings a proportionate increase in live stock, fed and fattened with it, and thus the productiveness of the soil is maintained by corn culture to a far greater degree than by wheat. The agricultural prosperity of what are now called the States of the Interior, is due far more to corn than to wheat and wool.

Wheat culture in those States, though developed to an enormous magnitude, has had the same history and results that have been sufficiently dwelt upon in describing exclusive production on the Atlantic coast. "If wheat growing was the only branch of western husbandry, the country would soon be poverty-stricken. They cannot compete with the newer lands of California and Oregon," says the President of the Michigan State Agricultural Society. "Our old agriculture, to save itself from ruin, must turn to new sources of wealth, must seek new branches of husbandry, and learn lessons of political economy from her immediate and older neighbors, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. All those have relinquished wheat growing, because it became necessary to do so, and have turned their attention to stock. The products of her dairies, her beef and pork, are worth more than her wheat ever was, when the land no longer refused to yield wheat."

The process of soil deterioration from continuous wheat culture, was far more rapid west of the great lakes than it had been at the East, in the days of the sickle and the scythe. The invention of improved implements has saved millions of dollars