A fertile soil alone does not carry agriculture to perfection.
When harvests are exuberant, joy and health follow in their train; but let delusive prosperity draw industry from agriculture; let an insiduous disease attack one of its important products; let an insect, or a parasite, fasten on a single esculent, and mark the effect upon commerce and human life. Upon such an event all business is deranged.
Agriculture has become essential to life; the forest, the lake, and the ocean cannot sustain the increasing family of man; population declines with a declining cultivation, and nations have ceased to be with the extinction of their agriculture.
