their injustice and the favor of Heaven have separated us.

He salutes Mr. Rush with sentiments of high respect and esteem.

TO E. I. DU PONT DE NEMOURS.

MONTICELLO, November 8, 1812.

DEAR SIR,-It is high time I should make my acknowledgments to you for the piece of cloth of your manufacture which you were so kind as to forward to me. But this article as well as the keg of powder forwarded with it have experienced singular delay. Though sent from Wilmington early in July, they were near two months, I believe, reaching Richmond; from which place they were forwarded to.me on the 18th of September, and have not yet reached me, owing to the low state of our river usual in autumn. The first good rain will, I expect, enable the boat to come up, but as I am setting out on a journey on which I shall be absent some weeks, I cannot permit myself to await their actual arrival and my return before I tender you my thanks for the cloth you have been so good as to favor me with. I am happy to know that we have established among us a manufacture from which we may expect to see the French processes, in both weaving and dyeing fine cloths, introduced among us. It is one of the articles in which they certainly excel the English. I am in hopes the Merino race

of sheep is so well established among us as to leave you in no danger of wanting that article. I have been unlucky with them. I began with one ram and three ewes. One of the ewes died of the scab, and the others for two years have brought me only ram lambs, so that I remain still with only two ewes. But I have many half bloods. There is no demand here for the wool, because we have no manufacture of fine cloth in the State. In that of coarse clothing we are going on very prosperously in our families. Scarcely a family fails to clothe itself. I salute you with great esteem and respect.

TO CHARLES W. PEALE.1

MONTICELLO, April 17, 1813.

DEAR SIR, I had long owed you a letter for your favor of Aug. 19, when I received eight days ago that of Mar. 2, 1812. A slip of the pen, I suppose,

1 Charles Wilson Peale was born in Chestertown, Maryland, April 16, 1741, and died in Philadelphia, Pa., Feb. 22, 1827. He followed at first the trade of a saddler, but while still a young man determined to be a portrait painter. In this profession he obtained a very considerable degree of success, and painted numerous portraits of Washington and the men of the Revolutionary period. He was also the founder and proprietor of the once famous Peale's Museum of Art and Natural History of Philadelphia. He was a man of great ingenuity and even greater versatility, and "took up, in turn, the making of coaches, harnesses, clocks, and watches, besides working as a silversmith, and he was also soldier, politician, naturalist, taxidermist, and dentist." Numerous letters to or from him are among the Jefferson Papers in the possession of the Massachusetts Historical Society. See Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography, vol. iv. pp. 689, 690.-EDS.

for 1813, and the pamphlet accompanying it strengthens the supposition. I thank you for the pamphlet.' It is full of good sense and wholesome advice, and I am making all my grandchildren read it, married and unmarried; and the story of farmer Jenkins will, I hope, remain in their minds through life. Both your letters are on the subject of your agricultural operations, and both prove the ardor with which you are pursuing them. But when I observe that you take an active part in the bodily labor of the farm, your zeal and age give me uneasiness for the result.

Your position that a small farm well worked and well manned will produce more than a larger one ill-tended, is undoubtedly true in a certain degree. There are extremes in this as in all other cases. The true medium may really be considered and stated as a mathematical problem: "Given the quantum of labor within our command, and land ad libitum offering its spontaneous contributions: required the proportion in which these two elements should be employed to produce a maximum." It is a difficult problem, varying probably in every country according to the relative value of land and labor. The spontaneous energies of the earth are a gift of nature, but they require the labor of man to direct their operation. And the question is so to husband his labor as to turn the greatest quantity of this "An Essay to promote Domestic Happiness," published in 1813.— EDS.

useful action of the earth to his benefit. Ploughing deep, your recipe for killing weeds, is also the recipe for almost everything good in farming. The plough is to the farmer what the wand is to the sorcerer. Its effect is really like sorcery. In the country wherein I live we have discovered a new use for it, equal in value almost to its services before known. Our country is hilly and we have been in the habit of ploughing in straight rows whether up and down hill, in oblique lines, or however they lead; and our soil was all rapidly running into the rivers. We now plough horizontally, following the curvatures of the hills and hollows, on the dead level, however crooked the lines may be. Every furrow thus acts as a reservoir to receive and retain the waters, all of which go to the benefit of the growing plant, instead of running off into the streams. In a farm horizontally and deeply ploughed, scarcely an ounce of soil is now carried off from it. In point of beauty nothing can exceed that of the waving lines and rows winding along the face of the hills and valleys. The horses draw much easier on the dead level, and it is in fact a conversion of hilly grounds into a plain. The improvement of our soil from this cause the last half dozen years strikes every one with wonder. For this improvement we are indebted to my sonin-law, Mr. Randolph, the best farmer, I believe, in the United States, and who has taught us to make more than two blades of corn to grow where only one grew before. If your farm is hilly, let me be

seech you to make a trial of this method. To direct the plough horizontally we take a rafter level of this A boy of thirteen or fourteen is

form A.

able to work it round the hill, a still smaller one with a little hough marking the points traced by the feet of the level. The plough follows running through these marks. The leveller having completed one level line through the field, moves with his level 30 or 40 yards up or down the hill, and runs another which is marked in like manner and traced by the plough, and having thus run what may be called guide furrows every 30 or 40 yards through the field, the ploughman runs the furrows of the intervals parallel to these. In proportion, however, as the declevity of the hill varies in different parts of the line, the guide furrows will approach or recede from each other in different parts, and the parallel furrows will at length touch in one part when far asunder in others, leaving unploughed gores between them. These gores we plough separately. They occasion short rows and turnings which are a little inconvenient, but not materially so. I pray you to try this recipe for hilly grounds. You will say with me, "Probatum est," and I shall have the happiness of being of some use to you, and through your example to your neighbors, and of adding something solid to the assurances of my great esteem and respect.