breathing pores, through which they take the carbonic acid. from the air. In the sunlight the green leaves decompose the acid, retaining the carbon and returning the oxygen to the air. This is done only in the presence of a strong light. By night they emit carbonic acid, or in other words, by day they feed and by night they simply breathe.

At the same time the root absorbs the water from the soil, in which is more or less plant food. This is carried to the leaf, there meeting the other elements taken from the air. These foods are assimilated and converted into plant food somewhat in the same way the food we take is converted into different elements for nourishing the body. All the wood, coal, and food in the world is formed by the action of the sunlight on the chlorophyl grains, or green matter in the leaves of plants, working to decompose the carbonic acid of the atmosphere. The soil out of which the plant grows not only supplies ready food, but there it is being continually compounded.

Most soils are composed of broken pieces of rock, ground up until one no longer recognizes it as such. The kind of soil in any place depends upon what the original rock of that division of country was. We do not mean the many boulders and stones lying upon the top of the ground here in northern New England, for these were brought here as drift during the glacial period, but we refer to our rocks in the soil, for soil is being transformed to rocks, and rocks to soil all the time. If the original rock was limestone, then we shall have a calcareous soil. Clays come from feldspar, sands and gravels from silicious rocks. Silicon is the element in the mineral kingdom as carbon is in the vegetable. It does not occur uncombined in nature. Prepared by the chemist in the free state, it is a dark powdery substance. Expose it to the air, and it mixes with the oxygen and it becomes oxide of silicon or silica. Silica is common quartz, so sands and gravels come from quartz. Soil made from granite will be strong, as granite is composed of quartz, mica, and feldspar. It will not only be capable of holding water, but rich in potash from the feldspathic part of the granite.

Decayed vegetation of course always enriches any soil. Just here is much that should interest every plant grower or farmer.

The botanical names employed are necessary for those dealing in plants, as they are the same the world over. Botany requires two names, one to specify the genus, the other the species, the flowers themselves in many cases suggesting their own

names.

As we stood at the entrance, where the perspective was the entire whole, and exulted in the perfection and harmony of nature's laws and methods, as we endeavored by our vision to grasp every point of beauty, thought drifted beyond the hedgerow, and we remembered that even the celestial spheres are supposed to make harmonious sounds by their accordant movements. And all this has been going up and out from the whole universe through all the ages. Harmony as related to musical composition is a succession of grand chords made up of the first or tonic, the second or mediant, and the fifth or dominant of the scale. As applied to the universe, the first was the whirling mist, the third the earth itself, and the fifth mankind. The octave is the fast passing years and their seasons of seeding, fruiting, and harvest, with all their joys and sorrows. There is a note that the most untutored ear will recognize, the resolving note we call it; this is, and has been, since that auspicious morn when the stars sang together, "love and good will to all mankind." As these thoughts come home to us, we are more conscious and certain that the hands sweeping up the keys of time were none other than those of the Supreme Musician, the Author of all the grand oratorios and sweet, delicate symphonies of nature.

Because the echo of these was sweetly, intensely, and truthfully resounding and resonant in our own selves, all the world seemed better and truer. Such is nature's influence to those who will receive it. Not only does it seem a necessity to all rural people, but a source of great satisfaction. One noted nature lover said: "When man lives with God his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the waters or the rustle of the corn, and although he is a small being in the midst of these objects in nature, yet by the moral quality radiating from his countenance, he may abolish all consideration of magnitude and by his manners equal the majesty of the world. And he who

knows what sweets there are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man, and only by calling in nature to his aid can he reach the height."-Emerson says, of godliness, but we would rather say, of a magnificent manhood tending towards godliness.

PRESIDENT HUMPHREY.-I now have the pleasure of introducing to you Hon. J. W. Sanborn, of Gilmanton, formerly a member of the New Hampshire State Board of Agriculture, and later president of Utah Agricultural College, who will speak to you upon Farming in Utah."

FARMING IN UTAH.

BY PROF. J. W. SANBORN, OF GILMANTON.

GENTLEMEN OF THE STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE AND CITIZENS It is with pleasure that I am enabled to meet again the New Hampshire Board of Agriculture in official session. After nine years of service with it, and when the ties that were broken that made me a part of its life, there still presided over its deliberations a gentleman whom I had learned to love, admire, and honor for his broad sympathies, clear judgment, and sterling integrity. I am deeply gratified that my dear old friend, ex-Mayor Humphrey, remains at the head of this board and by the providence of God is here to preside at this session.

The first address that, as a new member of this board, I was called upon to deliver, was given at Lancaster, in the year 1873, upon the subject of irrigation. It is something of a coincidence that to-night I am invited to deliver an address that is founded upon the same subject, for the irrigating canals are the life-blood of the agriculture of Utah. Dry up her canals, and all that constitutes the Utah of to-day is obliterated.

The activities of man fall easily under one or all of four comprehensive heads-moral, social, intellectual, or industrial life, and out of the first springs all that is enduring and great. Petrarch was right when he said that "Virtue alone can procure that independence which is the end of human wishes,” and

rightly interpreted the crisp phrase of Carlyle in which he says, "Matter exists only spiritually, and to represent some idea and body it forth" is correct. So far have moral or religious forces determined the character of the industrial forces of Utah, especially so its entirely unique farm system, that he who would understand rural life in this territory must necessarily know something of its religious history and religious polity.

Save the Jews under the Mosaic dispensation, probably no people of history have reflected in their agriculture so strongly their religious forces as have the Mormons theirs in the agriculture of Utah. The rural life of this mountain state began either in the cunning or in the religious fervor of a young lad of New York, of Vermont lineage, reputed to be of vagrant habits. A vision, we are told, led him to discover the hidden place of golden plates on which were written that which now constitutes the book of Mormon. He gathered about him a few followers, or those who would lead with him, until annoyed and alarmed by the methods or the success of the boy, Joseph Smith, his neighbors drove him from their presence. The outcast soon, by the operations of a system of mission service probably unequalled in history save that of the disciples of the great Master, began the erection of a temple to God on the soil of Ohio. In the meanwhile a settlement had been effected in western Missouri, which was and is to them the Zion of God, and there planted their temple grounds to the one God. Death marked the strife that soon began with their neighbors. At last, at the point of the bayonets of state militia, in bitterness of spirit, they again parted from their homes. Conflict served as fuel to brighten the fires of their religious enthusiasm. At [Nauvoo, Illinois, a costly temple soon witnessed for them the recuperative power of the germ from which their moral purpose drew its life. Fifteen thousand Mormons, exiles from Ohio, from which state they were driven, joined to those from Missouri, gathered beneath the shadows of their temple, when the strife broke out that closed with the murder of their prophet, Joseph Smith, by a mob, within the presence of the state militia. The event closed with the expulsion of the whole body in the dead of winter. From wealth they passed in a brief moment to the bitterness of abject poverty and

of intense suffering. In their movement westward over the snowy and houseless plains of Iowa, they left painful evidences of their terrible suffering in the corpses of their dear ones. Reaching the banks of the Missouri, they pitched their tents at Council Bluffs, and during the constrained halt to assuage their grief in this then wilderness spot, they inaugurated those social diversions that have given character to their social system to this day. Song, dance, and theatricals have no greater devotees in America than those and the descendants of those of this Mormon hegira. Out of the aching hearts of these religious exiles have grown up rural diversions in Utah that come early under the observation of visitors to this territory.

Over trackless and unexplored plains, for a thousand miles, they sought in the unknown valleys of Utah homes where it was thought civilization would never again contend with them. The story is a painful one of the march over alkali plains, of the first hard winter in Utah, when they lived on abbreviated rations; of the second summer, when the grasshoppers came near exterminating their crops and their hopes, and would have done so. but for the interposition, by divine direction, as they believe, of sea gulls, that came as they have never since come, and ate of this invader until his abbreviated army left enough to enable most of the settlers, by living on starvation rations weighed out to minuteness and supplemented by the roots of the plains and of the mountain sides, until many fell asleep through exhaustion, to pass the winter with life preserved.

One of the very first acts of this people was to select the site of their temple, and to-day, on the spot marked by Brigham Young the day he entered the valley, stands a temple that is estimated to have cost $4,000,000. Once this site was abandoned on the approach of the invading army of the government. Later, the confiscation of church property and other acts aimed against the Mormons kept them hammered together; yet under all this staggering load they have grown until they now number 300,000 persons.

Fused into one mass by the fires of religious persecution, as they believe, their hearts and memories made one by the remembrance of common losses of property and of friends through a long period of suffering, their confidence in their