So 



der. After the surface of the earth has been for months congealed and sealed 

 np, the congenial influences of the same sun ■whose power in impressing the 

 Daguerreotype we deamed so potent and magical, educes from the dreary 

 waste, not pictures, but realities of wonderful beauty and variety, and causes 

 to thrive and flourish and mature tlie sustenance for hundreds of millions of 

 men, and the countless swarms of animal life. To cause the groAvth of a 

 single spire of grass, elements far more numerous are called into requisition, 

 chemical action far more inscrutable is going on. Do you understand the 

 occult atti'actions, affinities, combinations, whicli enter into the germination 

 and growth of a single seed or plant, or the tiniest shoot of vegetation ? Do 

 you understand the delicate yet potent influences of light, heat, water, and 

 electricity? "Canst thou measure the sweet influences of the Pleiades?" 

 No ; you are as ignorant of most of the influences which affect your crops as 

 the clod you tread upon. Of some of the appliances which stimulate, of 

 some of the acts which destroy, you know something, but know little. Yet, 

 strange as it may seem, we hear men often exclaim : " I understand my busi- 

 ness well enough ; I want none of the instruction of your books." Are you 

 warranted in such assumptions ? No. You are guilty of impiety and blas- 

 phemy every time you utter it. You know little of the workings of nature's 

 great laboratory. You merely delve upon the surface. You grope in the 

 dark. When the world had not yet recovered from astonishment at the dis- 

 coveries of Newton, he declared that he felt like a man picking up pebbles on 

 the sea shore, while the great ocean of truth laid unexplored before him. If 

 you understand farming well enough, I mean as a science, you have fathomed 

 all the processes encased and hidden beneath the surface of the earth. You 

 are a wiser if not a humbler man than Newton, and to the question so sig- 

 nificantly asked, "Canst thou by searching find out God ? " you can triumph- 

 antly answer, " Yes." 



Farmers of Indiana, when you scout the idea that by the agency of socie- 

 ties, books, fairs, schools and chemical analysis and investigations you can 

 be taught nothing in either the art or the science of agriculture, you are 

 wrong — wrong practically, wrong theoretically, wrong morally, wrong politi- 

 cally, wrong economically, every way wrong. You have the audacity to do 

 what no other class or profession dare to do. All otlier classes of men are 

 eager, and laborious, and self sacrificing in the acquisition of knowledge. If 

 you would elevate your calling you must bring into requisition every aid and 

 appliance, like other trades and callings. Let every faculty be awake, let 

 every prejudice, and remnant of superstition be banished, and as a class of 

 men you will be healthier, wealthier, wiser, more cheerful, prosiJerous and 

 happy. I say as a class. The individual may suffer. Every age, every 

 trade, every sect or party in religion or politics, has its experimenters, its 

 charlatans and its martyrs. I know not by what law the tillers of the soil 

 are exempted from the frailties, or follies, or blunders of common humanity. 

 If they wait for some new revalation, some dispensation of a superior power 

 to enable them to float on the tide of prx)gress without incurring risk or fail- 

 ure — if they expect to be so inspired whenever they embark on the great field 



