The contrasted Beginning and End of the Half-Century.—What America brought to the New-Year’s Day of 1850 in the Raw, and what for the Grill of more refined Tastes.—Historical Stews, and their Foreign and Domestic Sauces.—What they were.—Attempts at, and Failures in, Insurrections in America.—Mechanical Inventions of the Half-Century; Steamboats, Telegraphs, Reapers, Sewing-Machines, etc.—Their Advantages.—Vestments and Investments.—Of Ether.—How Populations drifted to Cities.—Chicago bibulous and dropsical.—Public Men and their Versatile Principles.—Newspapers and their unfulfilled Prophecies.—Plutocracy.—Fashions and their Constancy to Change.—The Stormy Petrels of Commercial Disasters.—How Owners turn Wreckers.—Profits out of Losses.—Of Merchant Salvors.—The Effects of Gold Discoveries in California on Labor, Ladies’ Heads and Hearts.—Auriferous Marriages.—The Spite of Midas against Children.—Ecclesiastical Gardens in America.—The new Mormon Shrub of the _Genus Polygamous_.—Architectural Improvements.—American Houses and their Sites.—Farmsteads; their Better Complexion.—The Crops from the National Farms, the Sea and Land, in 1850.—Of American Literature, Science, Natural History, The Philosophies and other Branches of Knowledge, and their Cultivators, through the Half-Century.—Summary of the Bill of Fare for the Repast on the Half-Shell.—Its Character and Critics. The nineteenth century began in America comparatively lean and unfattened, with but sixteen States, and a population of 5,305,939. When, on New Year’s day, 1850, it was taken up from its native beds, it had grown to thirty States, and a population of 23,191,876. It had gathered American history enough to be served up in every style to its hungry, impatiently waiting crowds of customers. There was still plenty of it in the raw; heaps of materials swimming in abundant liquor; common work at rough, resisting nature, bivalved between the ordinary shells of laborious days and unwaking, sonorous nights; good honest-minded rough-handed labor, swinging the axe among Western settlements, and pricking gold, silver, and lead veins, and draining off their arterial currents into Atlantic bowls; shaggy-jacketed enterprise, brave in work, in patience, and cheerful endurance, quelling the rebellions of empty stomachs,—those quickly rising, wrathful, and speedily armed revolutionists,—and subjecting them to serve while the wheat ripened, and to wait upon a nourishing hope; and ploughmen planting broad and newly claimed fields with tasselled banners, and marching with their sheaved battalions to take growing towns and marts of business. “A mighty _maize_, but not without a plan.”