sheaths to wanton with the wind and caress the dews!  Is there any quick-witted farmer who shall tell us with anything like definiteness what the phosphates have contributed to all this, and how much the nitrogenous manures, and to what degree the deposits of humus?  He may establish the conditions of a sure crop, thirty, forty, or sixty bushels to the acre, (seasons favoring); but how short a reach is this toward determining the final capacity of either soil or plant!  How often the most petted experiments laugh us in the face!  The great miracle of the vital laboratory in the plant remains to mock us.  We test it; we humor it; we fondly believe that we have detected its secret:  but the mystery stays.

A bumpkin may rear a crop that shall keep him from starvation; but to develop the utmost capacity of a given soil by fertilizing appliances, or by those of tillage, is the work, I suspect, of a wiser man than belongs to our day.  And when I find one who fancies he has resolved all the conditions which contribute to this miracle of God’s, and can control and fructify at his will, I have less respect for his head than for a good one—­of Savoy cabbage.  The great problem of Adam’s curse is not worked out so easily.  The sweating is not over yet.

If we are confronted with mystery, it is not blank, hopeless, fathomless mystery.  Our plummet-lines are only too short; but they are growing longer.  It is a lively mystery, that piques and tempts and rewards endeavor.  It unfolds with an appetizing delay.  Every year a new secret is laid bare, which, in the flush of triumph, seems a crowning development; whereas it presently appears that we have only opened a new door upon some further labyrinth.

Throughout the seventeenth century, the progress in husbandry, without being at any one period very brilliant, was decided and constant.  If there was anything like a relapse, and neglect of good culture, it was most marked shortly after the Restoration.  The country-gentlemen, who had entertained a wholesome horror of Cromwell and his troopers, had, during the Commonwealth, devoted themselves to a quiet life upon their estates, repairing the damages which the Civil War had wrought in their fortunes and in their lands.  The high price of farm-products stimulated their efforts, and their country-isolation permitted a harmless show of the chivalrous contempt they entertained for the novi homines of the Commonwealth.  With the return of Charles they abandoned their estates once more to the bailiffs, and made a rush for the town and for their share of the “leeks and onions.”

But the earnest men were at work.  Sainfoin and turnips were growing every year into credit.  The potato was becoming a crop of value; and in the year 1664 a certain John Foster devoted a treatise to it, entitled, “England’s Happiness increased, or a Sure Remedy against all Succeeding Dear Years, by a Plantation of Roots called Potatoes.”