RELATIONS TO OTHER SCIENCES 719 



demands, not merely for food to keep the body alive, but for all the 

 resources needed to support a life growing ever more true and beau- 

 tiful? What encouragement, then, can we find in recent progress, for 

 believing that this world-old art will improve with the years and the 

 demands of the race ? 



The improvement of agriculture depends, of course, upon the soil, 

 including location as to latitude, longitude, climate, etc., upon the 

 plants and animals used; but most of all, after these things are pro- 

 vided, upon the farmer and his methods. The most we can do here is 

 to give a few illustrations of the advances made in recent years in 

 improving the soil and increasing its fertility, in developing plants, 

 and in training the farmer himself and improving his methods. We 

 hope in this way to give some idea of what we may expect to accom- 

 plish in the future for the advancement of agriculture. 



Agriculture, the oldest of the arts, was the very latest to apply the 

 discoveries of science. This is due to two causes. In the first place, 

 agriculture is the most difficult of the arts, and involves, one way and 

 another, directly and indirectly, the application of all the sciences. 

 Secondly, its workers have in the past been less trained in scientific 

 methods than those in other callings. Until recently agriculture has 

 been almost wholly an empirical art and only in very recent times has 

 the farmer received any special training for his profession. Always 

 intensely conservative he has learned new methods very slowly. 

 Many breaches have, however, been made in the wall of empiricism 

 which has surrounded him for centuries and the farmer who formerly 

 derided book-farming has now opened his mind to the lessons of 

 science. 



Since the farmer commenced to use the teachings of science, the 

 progress of agriculture has been extremely rapid; and as we may 

 expect that agriculture will make gigantic strides in the next decade, 

 the new agriculture, which is based on science rather than empiri- 

 cism and which is just now being introduced, is destined to advance 

 all the other industries and give the race a new forward impulse. 



This we must believe from the progress already made. Consider, 

 for example, the progress made since the time of Liebig in the study 

 of soils. Liebig based all his proposals for the conservation of fertility 

 and the improvement of the soil upon chemical composition, and his 

 teachings did much to improve our agricultural methods. According 

 to his theory the soil was composed of dead, inert matter, and the 

 question was how to provide the so-called mineral food of plants in 

 sufficient quantity and available form. For fifty years all methods of 

 soil improvement and culture were based upon this idea. The soil 

 was supposed to be devoid of all vitality until the crop appeared, 

 and the chief business of the farmer was to destroy every other form 

 of life. The question of nitrogen-supply had come to be looked upon 



