preserves forever the balance of her stupendous harmonies. Nothing loses a function except to gain one. Nothing comes to an end which is not a beginning. Every state is a stage of transition. All things flow with the tide of time, and the current is continually returning upon itself. The trees grow old and at last decay. Their mould builds up the ascending columns of another wood. By the processes of growth, the dust of the earth is upraised in grains of wheat and corn. Wheat and corn, as food, are assimilated by the organisms of animal life. Upon man and bird and beast alike descends the inevitable decree, "Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return ;" and so the cycle of transformation is renewed. Lawrence and Lowell and Manchester have been built upon the banks of the Merrimac in the faith that its current would never cease to flow. For ages it has flowed, and it flows on forever. And yet no inexhaustible, unreplenished fountain supplies it. With the cubical dimensions of the whole planet for a reservoir, no such fountain could have supplied it. The guaranty of the constant tide is in the equipoise of nature's self-sustaining system of compensations. Drop by drop falls. the rain upon the hills and mountains of New Hampshire. Dripping from the trees, oozing from the ground, it trickles in tiny rills, it gathers in brooks, which gather in larger streams. Down the slopes, in the swift torrent, through the rocky gorges, by waterfalls and cataracts, it is poured into the valleys below. It passes from the valleys and becomes the majestic river, which after toiling in three manufacturing cities at the wheels whose mighty revolutions turn nine hundred thousand spindles, and throw the shuttles of twenty-four thousand looms, glides on untroubled to find its level in the broad Atlantic. It finds its level, but it finds no rest. By the potent action of the sun, in subtle distillations it is raised upon the currents of an invisible sea, and borne again into the regions of the upper air. It collects and drifts upon the winds in vapory clouds, and finally again descends upon the sources of the spring and stream. To supply continually the rivers of

the globe, the Mississippis and the Amazons, the oceans into from their beds and plunged from

Nature in all her works gives one

which they flow are lifted the precipices of the sky. precept, "Waste not, want not, use, save and not destroy." These are the laws of permanence and power.

Where then among the forces of society shall we seek the principle whose operation shall harmonize with nature's grand economy, and be the basis of a system of agriculture that shall be perpetual and self-sustaining in the elements of a fertile soil? The conscience of the individual is of too limited a scope to be trusted to decide upon grounds of permanent wellbeing the issue in which present gain is met by a possible or prospective loss to unborn generations. This principle, if found, will be found most effectually established in the economy of the national industry, and so established that the present shall not be called to the difficult virtue of self-sacrifice, the resources of the future shall not be endangered, and the very working of the farm shall lay the foundation for still more abundant harvests. I find the hint of the principle sought, in that rule of good farming which enjoins the consumption upon the farm of the products of the farm, and the selection for the market, not of the hay and turnips, but the mutton and the beef. This economy carried out upon a national scale, would give us a distributed home consumption of agricultural products at diffused and accessible centres of a diversified mechanical and manufacturing industry, and of the commerce which such industry creates. For at these centres the fertilizing constituents of the harvest accumulate. Rejected by the processes of consumption, still as suitable for the crop as when deposited by the last inundation, they become again available to all neighboring farms, to which they are as truly the raw material of an agricultural product, as iron, cotton and wool to the machine-shop and the mill. The spread of cities like Lawrence throughout the land, with different industries, adapted to local capabilities, will give to the agriculture of the nation the conditions of a self-sus

taining, perpetually compensated, and lasting fertility. The agriculture of China that ante-dates the buried epochs of the Egyptian kings, and to-day flourishes, and feeds the swarming millions of that empire, is based upon the principle that seeks from the city restitution to the farm of what is taken from it by the harvest. Great as is the benefit which agriculture already derives from the neighborhood of centres of industry and commerce, it has hardly begun to use the resources which abound in such localities and should be made available. In a true economy, the city and the town should be regarded by the farmer as a part of his farm-domain. They are so by the laws of nature. They should be so in the practice of husbandry and the regulations of their police.

The problem of utilizing the sewage of cities, which is so earnestly discussed abroad, has vital relations to the progress of civilized states. Throughthe sewers of cities draining into rivers and the ocean, the highest properties of the soil are irrecoverably lost. The turbid currents of North river, the Thames and the Seine, are richer than Pactolus with its sands of gold. For that which is pollution to their waters is the touch of magic to the fields and the power of food for successive generations of men. The value of this material as a fertilizer is obvious, but it has been comparatively estimated and put beyond controversy by the experiments of the Prussian government in reclaiming land with the sewage of Dresden and Berlin. Land which without any applications yielded but three to one from the seed sown and seven to one when treated with the ordinary resources of the farm, yielded fourteen to one when fertilized from the sewer. As a mere problem of pecuniary saving it is a momentous one. The fertilizing portions of the sewage of the city of New York are computed, on the lowest estimate, to be worth seven million dollars per annum. We have authority for saying that the wasted drainage of the city of Boston is capable of restoring annually to a high condition thirty thousand acres of sterile land. The yearly waste of fertilizing elements in

Great Britain and Ireland are carefully computed at one hundred and forty million dollars. There is no direction in which ingenuity has of late been oftener or more effectively exercised, in the industrial arts, than in contriving modes by which the dross, the shavings, the chips, all the unassimilated residues that remain after the completion of the main product, are converted to some profitable use. But there is no problem to

turn itself with greater ad

which the ingenious mind could vantage, than that of utilizing sewage. The invention of a plan by which the slime and sediment of cities may be transformed into corn and wheat for human sustenance, and the vigor of the vegetating earth be perpetually renewed, gives scope for one of the most beneficent systems of economy ever devised. The revenues of a kingdom would be a cheap equivalent for such a plan. The statesman seeking for his country unfailing sources of prosperity, the sanitary physician striving to convert the fountains of disease and pestilence into fountains of life and strength, the farmer anxious to invigorate his exhausted lands, the chemist eager to give new proofs of the resources of his favorite science, the engineer who would render a public service, can afford to give this subject his deepest thought and care.

Centres of mechanical and manufacturing industry, and of the commerce based upon it, give to a system of agriculture its desired stability. There is little material out of which to make exhausted fields and nomadic farmers in a region that commands easy access to the market. Land there is valuable, and yields a rent; while the inducement of profit is always operating to keep it in good condition. No amount of native richness in the soil can make good the want of markets. But neighboring markets can make a sterile soil rich. Nothing will counteract the tendency of the American farmer to wander away from home, but a home demand for his product. This makes the fortunes of both the farmer and the farm. See what a stimulus the manufactures of England have been to her agriculture. Two centuries ago the highest aver

age crop of wheat in England was six bushels per acre. The lowest average in any of her counties to-day is thirty-four and a half bushels and from this the averages range up to fifty bushels per acre. In little more than a century she has brought her aggregate annual crops of wheat from sixteen million to ninety million bushels and converted a quarter part of her whole area from the marsh, the morass, the wilderness and the barren moor, into blossoming gardens. Her gintfactoried cities are set like islands in an emerald sea of verdure and fertility. And much the greater portion of this result has been the work of the last fifty years. The development of manufacturing industry in America is attended with like symptoms of a regenerating influence upon the soil. The tide of migration spreading from the Atlantic coast westward was one of devastation. An improved and fertilizing culture goes in the train of the new industries as they slowly diffuse towards the West, and repairs the waste places of early improvidence. It is indicative of this movement, that in states where manufacturing industry has been extensively developed in the ten years of the last census, the annual crop of garden products has increased in value, in Massachusetts three fold, in New York and Ohio four fold, during the same period. These crops are grown in the neighborhood of towns and cities. They require the most skilled and fertilizing culture, and are auguries of improving lands.

The intimate connection that exists between the prosecution of the arts of mechanical and manufacturing industry and the progress of a nation, needs no illustration in this city, county or commonwealth. The theme is a familiar one. The annual manufactures of Massachusetts, valued at two hundred and sixty-six million dollars, and structures like these we see around us here, distributed throughout her borders, are works that manifest her sturdy faith. This faith she has cherished along with her love of knowledge and of freedom; or rather these are the phases of her humane and earnest love of progress. In a diffused and diversified national industry and an exchange