146 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ILLINOIS 



for the people beyond, and most of all for those whose lives are spent on 

 the farms. It has been mine, as you know, to work in one of those great 

 national schools provided by our Government, chiefly for the benefit of 

 of the farming population of the country, and whatever affects the char- 

 acter or interests of the farmer has engaged my most serious thoughts. I 

 have studied with the utmost care the difficulties amid which they struggle, 

 the obstacles which lie in their path, the circumstances which affect their 

 lives, and the causes of frequent discontent which leads them to send their 

 children, when possible, toother pursuits, or induces those children some- 

 times without their parents' consent, to desert the farms for life in towns 

 and cities. Without denying or seeking to diminish the other difficulties 

 and disabilities which surround the farmers' toils and hinder his career, 

 I have the best authority for the assertion that it is the dullness, and too 

 often the dreariness, of the farmer's home which constitutes his most seri- 

 ous drawbacks, and sends his children from their native fields and firesides 

 to find in other spheres the gratifications which their natures crave, but 

 which farm life does not furnish. I do not affirm that the planting of 

 ornamental shrubs and flowering plants for the making of lawns and land- 

 scapes would remedy this evil, but I fully believe that wise attention to 

 Nature's higher wants, her cravings for the ideal, the agreeable, the beau- 

 tiful, is intimately associated with those other qualities of mind and heart, 

 and those otheramenitiesof life which are so often wanting in the farmer's 

 home. The very effort to shape his surroundings into more agreeable forms 

 would awaken many a farmer into thoughts and feelings which would be 

 fruitful of rgsults over every acre of his farm. With new and higher needs 

 would come fresh energy, more inspiriting ambition, quicker and broader 

 perceptions, and a capacity for better plans and truer economies. 



One of the grandest discoveries of modern science is that all of 

 nature's forces are so related that each may be transmuted into the other. 

 Light, heat, electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity, gravitation, and 

 perhaps even vital force — all are but so many varying forms of nature's 

 one indestructible, never increasing and never diminishing energy. 

 Heat is but a finer form of motion ; light is but the transformed heat, 

 and the flashing electricity is only another shape of this protean energy, 

 while the affinity that binds together the chemical unions, and the mag- 

 netism which points the polarized needle, and the world-building 

 gravitation which gathers matter into masses, and holds the worlds in 

 their orbits, are among the disguises which this universal energy wears 

 and discards by turns. From one of these forms to another it passes 

 with endless activity, but without ever losing a particle of its original 

 amount, or increasing in the least the exact measure of its original power. 

 Its disappearance in one form is but a transformation to another. The 

 self-same energy which burns in fire beneath the boiler, becomes steam 

 within the boiler, and a moment later this identical force is transformed 

 into the motion of wheels, the rush of the locomotive and the movement 

 of the cars. 



So, among the forces which make up the spiritual power of man, is 

 there not also a co-relation, or something analagous to it, by which a 



