Transcriber's Note: Italic text is denoted by _underscores_. Small capital text has been replaced with all capitals. Minor typographical and punctuation errors have been corrected without note. Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been retained as printed. Mismatched quotes are not fixed if it's not sufficiently clear where the missing quote should be placed. The cover for the eBook version of this book was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain. * * * * * THE RURAL MAGAZINE, AND LITERARY EVENING FIRE-SIDE. VOL. I. PHILADELPHIA, _Eighth Month, 1820_. _No. 8._ A FRIEND OF THE RURAL MAGAZINE TO ITS READERS. There is nothing in which the honourable fame and steady prosperity of our country, and the best interests of its inhabitants, are more deeply involved, than in _the promotion of agriculture_. With one hundred and twenty millions of acres of _cleared_, or _natural, strong, unwooded_ land, and a population computed at nine millions of persons, we have more soil already prepared for plantations, farms and grazing, in proportion to our numbers, than any other civilized people; and our capacities to add to our quantity of cleared or unwooded land, extend to ten times the number of acres. From the productions of these lands have our former happiness and wealth arisen, and from the commerce and fabrication of these productions, have our foreign and domestic trade, and all our home manufactures, worth above two hundred millions of dollars, sprung up. The merchants and manufacturers actually hold so real and great a competition for the natural and agricultural productions of the land, that none of these productions, capable of manufacture, were exported even in the last year, except _cotton_, in the manufacture of which we had made very great progress, in 1810; even without the double and war duties, or those existing at this time. They were supposed to be worth 15,000,000 of dollars in that year. The present crisis, when all nations are revising and improving their systems of agriculture, commerce and manufactures, appears to be a fit season for increased attention, consideration and exertion on our part; and first in the culture of the soil. It is proposed, as a suitable object for such a work as _The Rural Magazine_, to make some of those exertions in relation to _agriculture and the connected subjects_, which are often demanded by those strong tides in human life, which are dispensed to us in the course of divine Providence. Pennsylvania, and the five other states which are contiguous to her, making six in their whole number, contain about one hundred and forty millions of acres of land in the most temperate and genial _farming_ climates of our country. The southern parts of that noble farming district even favours the cotton, the vine and the fig tree; and every species of production, requiring the tone of the northern