"A little farm well tilled, a little house well filled, and a little wife well willed, are three most desirable objects," says Mr. J. S. Tibbits, in the Transactions of the Michigan Agricultural Society, a large octavo volume for 1854, which has been kindly sent to our table by J. G. Holmes, Esq., its industrious and intelligent secretary. Like the Illinois Transactions, already noticed, the work is full of intelligible facts, and is a highly important contribution to the agricultural literature of the country; we pronounce it a big book well distilled.

It embraces the Annual Report of the State Society, and takes up in detail the proceedings of the subsidiary county societies, reports of the great fair, and of the county fairs, statistics of farming, addresses delivered in various places, and incidentally strong arguments in favor of a State Agricultural School, that cannot be gainsaid. Lands in abundance belonging to the State are at its disposal, and we do not see how its legislators can help themselves from prosecuting so truly valuable a scheme; a scheme which is, or must be adopted and patronised by every progressive State.

One of the reports alludes in strong language to the exhaustive process of perpetual cropping; this sad but common error the farmers are becoming aware of, but do they realize that the system of impoverishing our lands, without sustaining their natural strength and fertility, will, sooner or later, end in barrenness? and that if the present population may rightfully exhaust one-third part of the arable lands of the United States of their natural fertility, the population which will be here at the close of the present century will, long before that period, have consumed the remaining two-thirds of all American territory? By a calculation which has appeared in a late report of the Patent Office at Washington, it is estimated that one thousand millions of dollars would not more than restore to their original richness and strength the one hundred millions of acres of lands in the United States, which have been already exhausted of their fertility! As a nation of farmers, is it not time that we inquire by what means, and on what terms, the fruitfulness of the earth and its invaluable products may be forever maintained, if not forever improved.

Agricultural schools would furnish all classes an opportunity to acquire a definite knowledge of all the known principles by which agricultural pursuits should be conducted. We have a more perfect state of civil and religious liberty than Europeans. Even the most free of those nations have a State religion to support, and therefore have no religions liberty; we have no great distinctions of caste which prevail abroad; we are comparatively free from taxes, and can therefore be more liberal to schools; the cultivators of the soil here are usually the owners of it, while the laborers in Europe have little concern in the matter, and take but little interest in getting up schools; nay, they are ignorant enough to oppose them, lest they should so improve agriculture as to diminish their wages. But there is no need to pursue the arguments so well enforced by this volume.

The advantages of railroads to an interior, are forcibly argued by several of the contributors, one of whom, alluding to the old wagon mode, which obliged the farmer to take his produce himself to market, adds: "He thus risked the temptation to appropriate a part of the proceeds for liquid returns which frequently floated off a goodly portion of the proceeds of the harvest, as, possibly, some of you have had occasion to know." In other words, the iron transporter don't drink whiskey! an advantage we had never thought of before. It was soon found, too, in regard to live stock, that a steer worth $60 or $70 at the Bull's Head in New York, cost no more for carriage from the oak openings of Michigan, or the prairies of Illinois or Indiana, than one worth but $35 or $40, and shrewd dealers discovered that they could afford to pay a better price for good animals of improved breeds than they could for inferior. So it is that farmers opposed to progress have been obliged to move off, and leave the field to the improvers, and a race of thoughtful, active men is usurping the old fogies.

To be a successful farmer now, one must learn things that were never taught or even dreamed of by the plain, straight-forward, strong-handed men, who had hewn their way to a home, axe in hand, and who were still contented with the work of the old-fashioned wooden plough, and the equally antique triangular harrow. Progress has become a necessity, which these western Transactions chroniole and promote.

In 1835, there was but one periodical in the Union devoted solely to the interests of agriculture; now they are almost as numerous as the States themselves. The example of the New York State Agricultural Society has aroused the minds of the farmers to their true interests; State after State came into the ranks; communities and counties marshalled their companies of independent yeomanry and wheeled into line; now,' all are actively engaged in battling the common enemy - the allied legions of ignorance and error. Twenty yean ago there was no opportunity of learning what is now learned each year from the published reports of societies, in relation to the improvements being made in the methods of tilling the soil; or of examining new implements, or of comparing the merits of the various breeds of foreign and domestic animals, or inspecting the grains, fruits, and vegetables of the best known descriptions. Whoever has attended a State Fair, with his mind awake, and his eyes open, will never despair of the Republic; whoever reads these Transactions attentively will rise, from their perusal, a wiser and a better man.

Michigan Agricultural Society #1

Those annual volumes of Transactions which issue from the various State societies of our country, are most gratifying evidences of the advancement of American agriculture. They commenced, long years ago, in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and, now and then, in other States; yet, after awhile, from the want of systematic action, gradually died out. In 1842, New York adopted a vigorous, well devised plan of publishing the annual transactions of its agricultural societies, which it still keeps up, to its great advantage; and its example has been followed by sundry other States, until such States as don't do it, have not much celebrity in agricultural spirit and improvement.

Why is it that the newer States, like Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and, perhaps, another one or two, are so far in advance of some of the older ones in such enterprises? I trust that these "old fogies" are not to be gathered up among the fossil remains of our agricultural enterprise. Their worn and stubborn soils still yield kindly fruits and harvests when properly tilled, and it only needs the active minds of their young farmers to put them rectus in curia, as the lawyers say, by the side of their younger brethren.