Such a system seems, at first sight, to argue a barbarous ignorance of the very first elements of agriculture; and yet, as Professor Johnston remarks, "we English farmers and teachers of agricultural science, with all our skill, should probably, in the same circumstances, do just the same, so long as land was plenty, labour scarce and dear, and markets few and distant." Let no one suppose that our wide-awake kinsman does not know perfectly well what he is about. His apparently rude agricultural practice is regulated by a maxim which some of our _Mechists_ at home would do well to bear in mind--that high farming is bad farming if it is not remunerative. He knows that to manure his land would be to insure the lodging and destruction of his crops, and he therefore leaves his straw to wither in the fields, and lives on in blessed ignorance of the virtues and cost of guano. To plough deep furrows in a virgin soil, saturated with organic matter, would be an idle waste of labour; and the primitive Triptolemus of Michigan scatters the seed upon the surface--or, raising a little mould on the point of a hoe, drops in a few grains of maize, covers them over, and heeds them no more till the golden pyramids are ripe for the knife. The first three crops, thus easily obtained, generally repay to the settler in the wilderness the expense of felling the timber, burning, and cultivating. If he then abandon it, he is at least no loser; but for eight or ten years the soil will still continue to produce crops of natural hay; and then, having extracted from it all that its spontaneous fertility will yield, he sells his possession for what it may bring, and moves off westward to repeat the same exhaustive process on a fresh portion of the forest, leaving to his successor the task of reinvigorating the severely tested powers of the soil by rest and restoratives.