332 



TRANSACTIONS OF THE CENTRAL 



art is developed. Enlightenment ensues. Science is bom. Brain force becomes superioi- to physical 

 power. The printing press stores up the l^uowledge of foregone generations. The flint and steel ot 

 mind upon matter knock out scintillaiions, illuminating the pathway of mankind, assisting one and 

 another in the study of the material and the spiritual in nature. The savage becomes first the herds- 

 man, then the husbandman; soon the arts of horticulture follow, and lastly come beautiful flowers 

 and landscape adornment. The sum of these is agriculture. Husbandry is the rearing of animals, 

 the cultivation of the cereals and grasses, and their preparation to become fit for food for man and 

 beast; horticulture is the growing of fruit, vegetables, trees and plants, flowers, rural and landscape 

 adornment. The poetry of Agriculture is Horticulture, and beautiful flowers are the religion of 

 Agriculture. A mere husbandman may know nothing about horticulture. A horticulturist may 

 know but little of husbandry, but he must necessarily kuow a good tleal about agric-ulture. An 

 agriculturist must understand all. The farm destitute of rural adornment looks sorry and cheerless 

 indeed. The villager's house, with its little parterre and vine-clad bower, pleases and cheers the 

 passer-by, while the costly and naked magnificence of the citizen's mansion is scarcely regarded at 

 all. But if, in passing along a country road, you come to a farm where the wealth of the owner has 

 enabled him to beautify and adorn the landscape and rural surroundings, the exclamation at once 

 comes forth— How lovely! How beautiful! The farm after all is the place for etfective landscape 

 adornment, and the farmer who is a horticulturist as well nuiy add much, and at comparatively 

 little expense, to the attractiveness aiid beauty and comfort of his liome. He perhaps moves into a 

 new country, poor enough,— his team, household eft'ects, honest hands, and a quarter section of wild 

 prairie, his all. He ploughs, sows, reaps, feeds cattle: this is husbandry. Of timber there is none. 

 He prepares his rows and plants hedges for fencing, nuts for timber; grafts and buds, strikes 

 cuttings, and rears orchards and vineyards. Curves a driveway Avinding about his buildings and 

 offices; makes a lawn shaded by spreading elms and lindens, with here and there other deciduous and 

 evergreen trees ; leads the streamlet Into the hollow and forms a lake ; builds, with advancing wealth, 

 a green house, a conservatory, an arboretum. This man, and only this, is an agriculturist. There are 

 many farmers in Illinois, who if, as they were growing rich, had devoted some of their money and 

 leisure to these subjects, would not now be lamenting that they had not sooner commenced to be 

 agriculturists instead of mere farmers. The fact is, farmers are too apt to think that there is some- 

 thing mysterious in Horticulture, especially in gardening; that in order to succeed they must hire a 

 professional, who about half of the time are mere botches; that they must send a tree butcher 

 into their orchard with a handsaw, an axe, and a ladder, to destroj' trees that were already doing 

 well enough. We only need to remember that the finer the production, the more care should be 

 bestowed upon it. That the delicate fruit or succulent vegetable forced into an abnormal condition 

 by high cultivation, can not be expected to continue to improve or even hold its o^vn without 

 continued high culture and care. We pay higli prices for new wheat, rye, barley, oats and corn, 

 from year to year, and yet after a few seasons of cultivation they become as the old sorts. It is 

 because we have not given them the same cultivation that they had previously received to bring 

 tliem up to the selling and actually to the economical standard. A man plants an orchard, turns in 

 his cattle to trim it, and his hogs to cultivate it; and feeds it, as he does his cattle, on grass. It is not 

 strange if his orchard is unproductive, and he thinks his is not a good Iruit country; while, if the 

 facts were known, there are but few farms in the West but what might at least produce wliat fruit they 

 consumed, that were hardy in tlieir climate; and yet how few farms at the present day in the West 

 produce their own fruit, and at the same time how dilHcult it is to find any section of the country 

 but that some farms in them produce fruit, and in abundance ! It is simply because we do not give 

 enough attention to diversified agriculture; we either run all to stock, or grain, or fruit, or some one 

 of the principal productions of Agricultural art— while more variety In our crops would give 

 greater exercise to the mind, and more varied enjoyment as well. We are doing something in that 

 direction by means of our various societies, but it necessarily works very slowlj'. We had hoped to 

 have done much through our Agricultural school, and there may, and, I hope, will be a bright pros- 

 pect for it somewhere in the future. In the far future I fear, if we are to wt>it for the graduates to go 

 out from there with "a smattering of Agriculture," and, after making fortunes in other pursuits, 

 return to their Alma Mater to assist in elevating into a science the "Empiricism" of Agriculture. 

 Oh! that the farmers of America might wake up to the great possibilities that lie before them; 

 that our rural youth wouid study those sciences that pertain to Agriculture, the mysteries ot 

 vegetable physiology. Why the same air, earth and water produce sound grain or smut, perfect 

 fruits or loathsome corruption. The simple and certain means which nature uses to convert 

 noxious and deleterious matter into plant food. To find the means of attracting to the soil or plant, 

 decomposing and rendering useful at will the latent elements, in air, earth and water. That the 

 eartli from becoming more and more barren each year, or relati vely, in other words, losing the power 

 of absorption and assimilation, shall grow fatter and fatter, more and more ijroductive, until it 

 shall be again re-instated in its original fertility. If the problem of a higher social existence is 

 solved, it must be solved by applying science, practical science, to industrial pursuits, and must 

 be tounded upon the dignity of Labor. We as a nation have been called superficial by some of the 



