But, sir, to come to more practical, and you will probably think, more appropriate topics, I will endeavor to show you that I am no enemy to new discoveries in agriculture or anything else. So far from it, I am going to communicate to you a new discovery of my own, which, if I do not greatly overrate its importance, is as novel as brilliant, and as auspicious of great results, as the celebrated discovery of Dr. Franklin; not the identity of the electric fluid and lightning, I don't refer to that; but his other famous discovery; that the sun rises several hours before noon; that he begins to shine as soon as he rises; and that the solar ray is a cheaper light for the inhabitants of large cities, than the candles, and oil, and wax tapers, which they are in the habit of preferring to it. I say, sir, my discovery is somewhat of the same kind; and I really think, full as important. I have been upon the track of it for several years; ever since the glitter of a few metallic particles in the gravel, washed out of Captain Sutter's mill-race, first led to the discovery of the gold diggings of California; which for some time past have been pouring into the country fifty or sixty millions of dollars annually.

My discovery, sir, is nothing short of this, that we have no need to go or send to California for gold, inasmuch as we have gold diggings on this side of the continent much more productive, and consequently much more valuable, than theirs. I do not of course refer to the mines of North Carolina or Georgia, which have been worked with some success for several years, but which, compared with those of California, are of no great moment. I refer to a much broader vein of auriferous earth, which runs wholly through the States on this side of the Rocky Mountains, which we have been working unconsciously for many years, without recognizing its transcendent importance; and which it is actually estimated will yield, the present year, ten or fifteen times as much as the California diggings, taking their produce at sixty millions of dollars.

Then, sir, this gold of ours not only exceeds the California in the annual yield of the diggings, but in several other respects. It certainly requires labor, but not nearly as much labor to get it out. Our diggings may be depended on with far greater confidence, for the average yield on a given superficies. A certain quantity of moisture is no

doubt necessary with us, as with them, but you are not required, as you are in the placers of California, to stand up to your middle in water all day, rocking a cradle filled with gravel and gold-dust. The cradles we rock are filled with something better. Another signal advantage of our gold over the California gold, is, that after being pulverized and moistened, and subjected to the action of moderate heat, it becomes a grateful and nutritious article of food; whereas no man, not even the long-eared King of Phrygia himself, who wished that everything he touched might become gold, could masticate a thimbleful of the California dust, cold or hot, to save him from starvation. Then, sir, we get our Atlantic gold on a good deal more favorable terms than we get that of California. It is probable, nay, it is certain, that, for every million dollars' worth of dust that we have received from San Francisco, we send out a full million's worth in produce, in manufactures, in notions generally, and in freight; but the gold which is raised from the diggings this side, yields, with good management, a vast increase on the outlay, some thirtyfold, some sixty, some a hundred. But, besides all this, there are two discriminating circumstances of a most peculiar character, in which our gold differs from that of California, greatly to the advantage of ours. The first is

this:

On the Sacramento and Feather rivers, throughout the placers, in all the wet diggings and the dry diggings, and in all the deposits of auriferous quartz, you can get but one solitary exhaustive crop from one locality; and, in getting that, you spoil it for further use. The soil is dug over, worked over, washed over, ground over, sifted over-in short, turned into an abomination of desolation, which all the guano of the Chincha Islands would not restore to fertility. You can never get from it a second yield of gold, nor anything else, unless, perhaps, a crop of mullein or stramonium. The Atlantic diggings, on the contrary, with good management, will yield a fresh crop of the gold every four years, and remain in the interval in condition for a succession of several other good things of nearly equal value.

The other discriminating circumstance is of still more astonishing nature, The grains of the California gold are

dead, inorganic masses. How they got into the gravel; between what mountain millstones, whirled by elemental storm-winds on the bosom of oceanic torrents, the auriferous ledges were ground to powder; by what Titanic hands the coveted grains were sown broadcast in the placers, human science can but faintly conjecture. We only know that those grains have within them no principle of growth or reproduction, and that, when that crop was put in, chaos must have broken up the soil. How different the grains of our Atlantic gold, sown by the prudent hand of man, in the kindly alternation of seed-time and harvest; each curiously, mysteriously organized; hard, horny, seeming lifeless on the outside, but wrapping up in the interior a seminal germ, a living principle!

Drop a grain of California gold into the ground, and there it will lie unchanged to the end of time, the clods on which it falls not more cold and lifeless. Drop a grain of our gold, of our blessed gold, into the ground, and lo! a mystery. In a few days it softens, it swells, it shoots upwards, it is a living thing. It is yellow itself, but it sends up a delicate spire, which comes peeping, emerald green, through the soil; it expands to a vigorous stalk; revels in the air and sunshine; arrays itself, more glorious than Solomon, in its broad, fluttering, leafy robes, whose sound, as the west wind whispers through them, falls as pleasantly on the husbandman's ear, as the rustle of his sweetheart's garment; still towers aloft, spins it verdant skeins of vegetable floss, displays its dancing tassels, surcharged with fertilizing dust, and at last ripens into two or three magnificent batons like this [an ear of Indian corn], each of which is studded with hundreds of grains of gold, every one possessing the same wonderful properties as the parent grain, every one instinct with the same marvelous reproductive powers. There are seven hundred and twenty grains on the ear which I hold in my hand. I presume there were two or three such ears on the stalk. This would give us one thousand four hundred and forty, perhaps two thousand one hundred and sixty grains as the produce of one. They would yield next season, if they were all successfully planted, four thousand two hundred, perhaps six thousand three hundred ears. Who does not see that, with this stupendous progression, the produce of

one grain in a few years might feed all mankind? And yet with this visible creation annually springing and ripening around us, there are men who doubt, who deny the existence of God. Gold from the Sacramento River, sir! There is a sacrament in this ear of corn enough to bring an atheist to his knees.

But it will be urged, perhaps, sir, in behalf of the California gold, by some miserly "old fogy," who thinks there is no music in the world equal to the chink of his guineas, that, though one crop only of gold can be gath ered from the same spot, yet, once gathered, it lasts to the end of time; while (he will maintain) our vegetable gold is produced only to be consumed, and when consumed, is gone forever. But this, Mr. President, would be a most egregious error both ways. It is true the California gold will last forever unchanged, if its owner chooses; but, while it so lasts, it is of no use; no, not as much as its value in pig iron, which makes the best of ballast; whereas gold, while it is gold, is good for little or nothing. You can neither eat it, nor drink it, nor smoke it. You can neither wear it, nor burn it as fuel, nor build a house with it; it is really useless till you exchange it for consumable, perishable goods; and the more plentiful it is the less its exchangeable value.

Far different the case with our Atlantic gold; it does not perish when consumed, but, by a nobler alchemy than that of Paracelsus, is transmuted in consumption to a higher life. "Perish in consumption," did the old miser say? "Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die." The burning pen of inspiration, ranging heaven and earth for a similitude, to convey to our poor minds some not inadequate idea of the mighty doctrine of the resurrection, can find no symbol so expressive as "bare grain, it may chance of wheat or some other grain." To-day a senseless plant, to-morrow it is human bone and muscle, vein and artery, sinew and nerve; beating pulse, heaving lungs, toiling, ah, sometimes, overtoiling brain. Last June, it sucked from the cold breast of the earth the watery nourishment of its distending sap-vessels; and now it clothes the manly form with warm, cordial flesh; quivers and thrills with the five-fold mystery of sense; purveys and ministers to the higher mystery of

thought. Heaped up in your granaries this week, the next it will strike in the stalwart arm, and glow in the blushing cheek, and flash in the beaming eye; till we learn at last to realize that the slender stalk, which we have seen shaken by the summer breeze, bending in the corn-field under the yellow burden of harvest, is indeed the "staff of life," which, since the world began, has supported the toiling and struggling myriads of humanity on the mighty pilgrimage of being.

Yes, sir, to drop the allegory, and speak without a figure, it is this noble agriculture, for the promotion of which this great company is assembled from so many parts of the Union, which feeds the human race, and all the humbler orders of animated nature dependent on man. With the exception of what is yielded by the fisheries and the chase (a limited, though certainly not an insignificant source of supply), agriculture is the steward which spreads the daily table of mankind. Twenty-seven millions of human beings, by accurate computation, awoke this very morning, in the United States, all requiring their "daily bread," whether they had the grace to pray for it or not, and under Providence, all looking to the agriculture of the country for that daily bread, and the food of the domestic animals depending on them; a demand, perhaps, as great as their own. Mr. President, it is the daily duty of you farmers to satisfy this gigantic appetite; to fill the mouths of these hungry millions-of these starving millions, I might say-for, if, by any catastrophe, the supply were cut off for a few days, the life of the country-human and brute-would be extinct.

How nobly this great duty is performed by the agriculture of the country, I need not say at this board, especially as the subject has been discussed by the gentleman [Mr. Winthrop] who preceded me. The wheat crop of the United States the present year, is variously estimated at from one hundred and fifty to one hundred and seventyfive millions of bushels; the oat crop at four hundred millions of bushels; the Indian corn, our precious vegetable gold, at one thousand millions of bushels! a bushel at least for every human being on the face of the globe. Of the other cereal, and of the leguminous crops, I have seen no estimate. Even the humble article of hay-this poor