"Ground, wood, and medowe" were matters of dispute between Newtown and its neighbors as early as 1632, and the frequent references to questions regarding the boundary of Newtown go to show dissatisfaction in the discarded metropolis, the number of whose people was out of proportion to its resources. Cattle were scarce in the colony. Each head was worth about twenty-eight pounds, the equivalent of several hundred dollars of money in our time. The Newtown people saw no prospect of foreign trade, and found the plowable plains of Cambridge dry and sandy. They had given up trying to coax fortunes from the stony hill land of the town with hand labor, and turned their attention to the more profitable pursuit of cattle-raising. They took unusual pains to protect their valuable herd from the wolves by impaling a common pasture. Natural meadow was the only resource for hay in the English agriculture of the seventeenth century, and the low grounds of Cambridge yielded a poor grass. Shrewd men in Newtown already saw that as an agricultural colony Massachusetts was destined to failure, and one Pratt, a surgeon there, was called to account for having written to England that the commonwealth was "builded on rocks, sands, and salt marshes." VI. [Sidenote: Cotton and Hooker.] [Sidenote: Compare Walker's First Church of Hartford, 129-132.] There is good authority for believing that a rivalry between Hooker and Cotton had quite as much to do with the discontent as straitened boundaries and wiry marsh grass. Hooker was the greatest debater, perhaps, in the ranks of the Puritans. His theology was somewhat somber, his theory of Christian experience of the most exigent type. To be saved, according to Hooker, one must become so passive as to be willing to be eternally damned. In other regards he was a Puritan of a rather more primitive type than Cotton. He knew no satisfactory evidence of a man's acceptance with God but his good works. Cotton was less logical but more attractive. His Puritanism grew in a garden of spices. He delighted in allegorical interpretations of the Canticles, his severe doctrines were dulcified with sentiment, and his conception of the inward Christian life was more joyous and mystical and less legal and severe than Hooker's. He was an adept in the windings of non-committal expression, and his intellectual sinuosity was a resource in debate or difficulty. Hooker, on the other hand, had a downrightness not to be mistaken. With an advantage in temperament and the additional advantage of position in the commercial and political center, it is not surprising that Cotton's ideals eloquently and deftly presented soon dominated the colony and that he became the Delphic oracle whose utterances were awaited by the rulers in emergencies. [Sidenote: Theological differences.] [Sidenote: Note 1.] [Sidenote: Note 2.]