All uncertainty as to the feasibility of the new plow having been removed, and actuated by that broad philanthropy which was one of the peculiar charms in the character of Mr. Wood, he desired to extend as widely as possible the area of his usefulness, and concluded to make the Czar of Russia, so long the chief grain exporting country of the world, the present of one of his plows. During the Revolutionary war, then fresh in the American mind, that great sovereign, Catherine of Russia, had been the staunch friend of this country, and that, too, without being impelled by jealousy of Great Britain. It seems to be a peculiar trait in the Romanoff family to admire liberty in the abstract, however absolute in practice. Sharing the prevailing good will toward Russia, Mr. Wood conceived this happy thought of making a truly substantial contribution to Cossack civilization, a civilization ever ready, with all its crudeness, to adopt foreign improvements. That gift, in one point of view slight, proved of great benefit to Russian agriculture. It is impossible to state the extent of actual advantage derived by Russia from that truly imperial gift. It was in effect giving to that country, second only to the United States in area of tillage, in proportion to population, the free use of the perfected plow. In an old copy of the New York _Tribune_, in its palmy days of Horace Greeley and Solon Robinson, the tale of the Plow and the Ring is unfolded. It runs thus: "During the year, 1820, Jethro Wood sent one of his plows to Alexander I, Emperor of Russia, and the peculiar circumstances attending the gift and its reception formed a large part of the newspaper gossip of the day. Wood, though a man of cultivation, intellectually as well as agriculturally, was not familiar with French, which was then as now the diplomatic language. So he requested his personal friend, Dr. Samuel Mitchill, President of the New York Society of Natural History and Sciences, to write a letter in French to accompany the gift.