186 STATE BOAKD OF AGRICULTURE. 



gatioii. Book farming is no worse than book-any-thing-elst'. Experience is 

 the only scl)oolniaster that gives certainty to knowledge. The case is similar 

 in tlie learning of sciences. A general knowledge of astronomy, geology and 

 classihcation in zoology, sucli as an educated man is expected to possess, and 

 such as is really of value to him in his conversation, liis reading, and his travels, 

 would be very insuflicient for practical use. The knowledge must be made 

 familiar. 



The general propositions of the sciences must not simply be known, but 

 enough of tlie individual facts on which these propositions rest must be known 

 to make them both be, and be felt to be, the summing up of a knowledge of 

 details. A short course of lessons never gives the mastery of principles in any 

 science. It is only by living for a considerable period of time in the midst of 

 the things and processes of which the science teaches that this mastery is 

 gained. The three hours' daily labor on the farm holds students to a place 

 where their scientific knowledge is under constant handling and review, and 

 where it will impress itself on the memory in ever changing relationships. 



4. Out of the peculiar mental training I have described comes our best hopes 

 of an improved agriculture. Machinery is frequently invented by men whose 

 lives are spent for the most part in pursuits very removed from the objects of 

 their inventions. A lawyer invented the seed drill. The person who so sim- 

 plified it as to bring it into general use was a college president. A clergyman 

 invented the mower, and a teacher the cotton gin. But the principles of me- 

 chanics are comparatively well known ; the circumstances that modify mechani- 

 cal action comparatively limited. It is often possible from the principles 

 known to predict the result of any combination of forces. The process of 

 reasoning is largely what the logicians call deductive. And even here where 

 the agents are most obscure, as in heat and electricity, the inventions are com- 

 monly made by men who are familiar with all the details of the work in hand, 

 through every day employment with them. 



The kind of discipline and habit of thought required for the advancement of 

 agriculture is not deductive so much as inductive. The art, the science, are 

 experimental. There are no few well known principles underlying agriculture, 

 as the few laws of motion underlie mechanics. Many of nature's operations 

 in plant and animal life are yet unknown, and those that are known are so 

 combined in action with the unknown that there is but little chance for inven- 

 tion in agriculture like invention in machinery. Tiiere are needed for the 

 furtherance of agriculture as a science men not only well acquainted with 

 chemistry and animal and vegetable physiology, and with their practical appli- 

 ances, but possessed also of inductive skill, ready to compare phenomena and 

 elicit general laws of likeness and difference, apt to seize upon any suggestive 

 change in the working of things, and qualified to experiment with it, and to 

 interpret the results. Now, although the grand generalizers that give us uni- 

 versal laws are but ones in millions of the race, there is still a process of lesser 

 generalization, and certainly of the collection of facts, without which general 

 laws cannot be educed, going on by educated observers in all sciences and arts. 

 Such furtherers, at least, of the science and art of agriculture, we would have 

 ourgraduatesto.be. William AV^hewell has planned his elaborate histoi'y of 

 the Inductive Sciences on the fact that men of ordinary education and skill 

 have first to collect and establish and make numerically accurate vast quanti- 

 ties of facts before the general law that binds them into one, and that furnishes 

 rules for art, can be announced. The genius appears at last, God-sent, and 

 gives us the key to new mysteries of nature. 



