an and "shorts" being very
valuable for mixing with the food of horses, cattle, and swine. A
flouring mill is a great benefit in a rural district, it furnishes the
farmer with a home market, and when he receives the price of his
produce, there are many domestic wants which must be supplied, and on
this account we always see stores and mechanics' shops clustering
around a mill, and villages springing up in places where the solitude
of the forest was, until lately, unbroken by a sound. It is evident
that the mill power of Michigan is increasing rapidly, and that in
future the greater part of the surplus grain crop will be exported in
a manufactured state.

In former years the prices of grain in the United States were
controlled by the European markets, and consequently the grain trade
of the Western States was governed by the produce merchants in the
Atlantic ports, but lately the whole order of things seems to have
been reversed, as breadstuffs of every kind were dearer in the Western
than in the Eastern markets. There were several reasons for this
anomaly. On account of the ravages of insects, and other causes which
we have alluded to, farmers were induced to place very little reliance
on the wheat crop, and many were driven into other branches of
husbandry, and in some places wheat became scarce. Add to this the
rapid increase of the population which created a local demand for all
kinds of food, and caused immense quantities of breadstuffs to be
required in places where a few years before there was no market for
anything. The rapid and extraordinary growth of Detroit and all the
Western cities, and the formation of new settlements, created a home
market for Western produce, for the population of cities being
consumers of the fruits of the land, instead of producers, have
always a wonderful effect on the markets of their localities, and the
pioneers in the forest or prairie must for a time depend on the older
settlements for subsistence.

From a defective system of agriculture the soil of the old States has
been deteriorating for several years. In Massachusetts the hay crop
declined twelve per cent. from 1840 to 1850, notwithstanding the
addition of 90,000 acres of mowing lands and the grain crop
depreciated 6000 bushels, although no less than 6000 acres had been
added to the tillage lands of that State.

In 1840 the wheat crop of New York was about twelve and a quarter
millions of bushels, and only nine millions in