Counties in our State. II. Formerly, Wood was the only fuel known to our farmers, while immense quantities of it were burned in our cities, at the salt-works, etc. At present, wood is scarcely used for fuel, except as kindling, in any of our cities, villages, or manufactories, while the consumption of Coal by our farmers is already very large, and rapidly extending. All this reduces the demand for labor on our farms and in our forests, while increasing the corresponding demand in the Coal Mines, and on the railroads. Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, has doubled her population within the last twelve or fourteen years; and this at the expense of our rural districts. III. Our agricultural implements and machinery grow annually more effective, and at the same time more costly. The outfit of a good farm costs five-fold what it did forty years ago. The farmer makes and secures his Hay far more rapidly and effectively than his father did, but pays far more for Reapers, Mowers, Rakers, etc.; in other words, he makes Winter work abridge that of Summer--makes a hundred days' work in some village or city save thrice as many days' work on his farm. This enhances his profits, but swells our urban, while it diminishes our rural population. IV. Much has been said of the degeneracy and increasing sterility of the New England Puritan stock. All this is shallow and absurd. There never before were so many people who proudly traced their origin to a New England ancestry as now. What is true in the premises is this: The New England stock is becoming very widely diffused, and is giving place, to a considerable extent, to other elements in its original home. Forty years ago, at least seven-eighths of the inhabitants of Boston were of New England birth and lineage; now, hardly half are so. The descendants of the Pilgrims are scattered all over our wide country; while hundreds of thousands have flowed in from Ireland, from Germany, from Canada, to fill the places thus relinquished; and, since most of the immigrants, whether into or out of New England, seek their future homes in the spring-time of life, their children are mainly born to them after rather than before their migration. The Yankees have no fewer children than formerly; but they are now born in Minnesota, in Illinois, in Kansas; while those born in New England are, for identical reasons, in large proportion of Irish or of Canadian parentage. There are New England townships, whereof most of the heads of families are long past the prime of life; their children having left them for more attractive localities, and the work on their farms being now done mainly by foreign-born employes. As a general rule, the boys first wandered off; leaving the girls only the alternative of following, or dying in maidenhood. Marked diversities of race, of creed, and of education, have thus far prevented any considerable intermingling of the Yankee with the foreign element by marriage. And what is true of New England is