To most people of middle age or beyond, the collection of machinery is peculiarly interesting. Young people have no personal knowledge of the extraordinary progress of invention within the last twenty-five or thirty years. Thirty years ago and men and women were reaping the ripened grain just as the Greeks and Romans did 700 B. C., and just as the servants of Boaz did on the plains of Bethlehem 1100 B. C., and, in fact, just as Noah and his family did when they raised the first crop after they left the ark. But there has been a revolution in the implements of husbandry. A crooked stick is no longer used as a plow, but in the place of the stick are plows of all shapes and sizes, gold mounted and nickel plated, as ornamental as a parlor piano. The rude hoe is superseded by all sorts of cultivators. Planting is done by machinery, elaborate, exact, scientific and elegant. The great Daniel Webster when asked as to the best way to hang a scythe replied the best way he had ever found (and he was brought up on a farm) was to hang it over the limb of a tree. If he could see these mowers and the many other machines to make hay, he would conclude that he had reached the millennium as far as hay making is concerned. So, too, the sickle has given way to the machinery drawn by a span of horses, that can almost do the work required on a trot. The machine reaps, gathers up and binds the bundles. Not long ago all threshing was done by tying two straight sticks together with a string, the best string was an eelskin dried and tanned, and then the farmer, in dust and solitude, would pound away at the straw laid out upon the barn floor; but here is a machine that will thresh and winnow wheat as fast as six men can toss in the bundles to the man who feeds, and it will take as many more to remove and stack the straw. And so it is with the whole business of farming. What is true of the processes is equally true of almost every other manual industry. It is a revelation of wonders to walk about amid these exhibits of machinery, and remember that to all intents and purposes the results we behold are the achievements of the last fifty, and in most cases of the last thirty years. And it is equally remarkable that most of these inventions are the offspring of American thought.