trade of trades, the great science of sciences, the great art of arts, agriculture, 

 have too often wilfully closed their minds to instruction, and the reception of 

 knowledge. When we see a fellow being bereft of sight or hearing, our liveli- 

 est sympathies are awakened ; yet many of us walk around the world doggedly 

 dosing our eyes or refusing to exercise half our senses, half our faculties, and in 

 fact the recipients of no more true knowledge and ideas, than though half our 

 perceptions were lost. The law by which all perfection is obtained, is your 

 law. That law is perpetual study and ceaseless toll. Whoever teaches that a 

 farmer leads a charmed life, and is exempt from the performance of every 

 rigid duty, like other men, teaches folly and a falsehood. Look in the water, 

 it will reflect you back in symmetry and strength, or in deformity and weak- 

 ness, just as you are. So you can neither gain nor lose respectability by your 

 profession, but only from the fidelity and dignity with which you pursue it. 



It would give me the most pleasure to consume my hour in the discussion 

 of some single topic But this is no place to convey thorough, detailed in- 

 struction. It is a place, however, where we can spur, and prompt, and stimu- 

 late and encourage each other. Suffer me therefore, to throw out desultory, 

 practical hints. The studying, and the thinking, and the working, you must 

 do elsewhere. Learn to learn — ^learn to work without waste — ^learn to study ; 

 then the farm you tread upon, the home you live in, will afford a field more 

 prolific in instruction than the library, the gallery, or the museum. 



Listen, then, to hints rather than an elaborate essay. I scorn rhetoric and 

 flattery on the one hand — I hope to escape dullness and discourtesy on the 

 other. I shall try to speak truths. 



First, I regard it as the duty of farmers to have more communion with each 

 other ; to make and to seek opportunities to compare and communicate with 

 each other. Mechanics work in close proximity to each other. They are all 

 the time engaged in sharp competition. They profit alike by each other's 

 blunders or each other's successes. Merchants meet each other hourly in 

 crowded thoroughfares, and on the exchange. What one knows, all can readily 

 know. Inevitable failure and ruin often follow an obstinate adherence to an 

 eld track, when time, toil and expense are saved by the adoption of the new. 

 Not so with fanners ; necessity does not throw them together. They have 

 few chances for consultation, and still fewer chances for correction of blun- 

 ders. It takes a whole year to correct a single error. But few experiments 

 can be tried in a lifetime. An error in planting the crop, is an error which 

 may plunge the farmer into pecuniary ruin. How much it becomes us there- 

 fore, to consult everywhere, with all men, and on every fitting occasion, that 

 we may be guided in all our enterprises by all existing light and knowledge. 

 There are men, it is true, whose converse with nature is richer in instruction 

 than the teachings of men. A man can study a lifetime in a single garden, 

 and delve only on the surface of the great mysteries of nature. It is true that 

 «;ach farmer walks every morning into a vast palace, compared with which the 

 crystal palace is mere tinsel — a bauble. Each trembling dew drop, glistening 

 on the tiniest spire of grass, rivals in brilliancy and exceeds in usefulness the 

 ' great diamond, Ko-i-nor. Realities are all around him — not the shams — not 



