1844, Dr. 4.60 1845, 5.00 1846, 5.16 1847, 6.77 1848, 5.83 ---- Average of five years, 5.47 It is much to be regretted that Professor Johnston was unable to extend his tour to these granary States of the West. It would have been satisfactory to have had from him an estimate of their capabilities founded on actual survey and personal observation, instead of indirect inference. We are quite ready to admit, that many of the accounts of those regions which have reached us, drawn up to suit the purposes of speculators in land, are of very dubious authenticity, and, like the stage-coach in which Mr Dickens travelled to Buffalo, have "a pretty loud smell of varnish." But, on the other hand, we cannot discredit the official data supplied by the State papers--without at least stronger grounds than those inferences from general geological structure which Professor Johnston has adduced to disprove the alleged fertility of the State of Michigan. There can, of course, be no more valuable criterion of the natural agricultural value of a country than is afforded by its geology--provided the survey be sufficiently extensive and accurate. But it is difficult to follow those enthusiasts in the science, whom we occasionally find drawing the most startling deductions from very narrow data--and prophesying the future history of the territory, and even the character of its inhabitants, from a glance at the bowels of the earth, as the Roman augur foretold the fate of empires from the entrails of his chickens. We find, for example, a writer of high standing in America accounting for a remarkable diminution in the amount of _bastardy_ in Pennsylvania, some thirty years ago, by the fact--that the settlers at that time _had got off the cold clays and on to the limestone_! A Scottish geologist, with more apparent reason perhaps, has founded an argument for an extensive emigration of the Highlanders on the prevalence of the primitive rocks in the north and west of Scotland. It is only from a complete and systematic survey that we can venture to predicate anything with certainty of the future agricultural powers of a country; and, in the absence of such trustworthy data, we must be content to estimate the future wheat-productiveness of Michigan, as well as of the other States we have named along with it, from what we know of their present fertility, and of the vast extent that is still uncleared.