PROGRESS IN AGRICULTURAL SCIENCE. 333 



future of agriculture is involved in the present ; and yet, if we 

 understand that idea, and examine it in all its width and depth, 

 we may perhaps get some profit. The future, then, of agricul- 

 ture is involved in the present. But what is the present ? What 

 do we know ? What is our condition ? Go with me for a few 

 moments, while we take account of stock, and see what we really 

 do know ; and then let us answer the inquiry how we came to 

 know what we do ; for, seeing first what we have, and secondly, 

 how we came to possess it, we may be better able to devise meas- 

 ures for the future, which measures, put into efiect, will determine 

 what that future is to be. 



Now I say, the agriculture of the present, and indeed the agri- 

 culture of all time, is but natural history applied. Applied to what? 

 To the production of food, to the production of sustenance for man 

 and beast ; shall we say, limiting the whole matter there ? We shall 

 need to do more than take that view of it. We shall need to look 

 at agriculture in all its relations, not simply with reference to the 

 production of our daily bread, which I admit is of primary impor- 

 tance. 



If agriculture is natural history applied, let us inquire still fur- 

 ther, what is natural history, and how have we come to our present 

 attainments in this department of knowledge ? Natural history 

 takes up whatever is found upon the earth, or indeed within the 

 earth, and, in a still broader sense, whatever may be discovered 

 from the earth, and attempts to describe, systematize and classify 

 it. It attempts to do all that. Before I go further in that direction, 

 I beg leave to call your attention to the fact, that in the develop- 

 ment of science — (and here allow me a parenthesis: I say what I 

 do now more especially to those members of the Agricultural Col- 

 lege whom I see before me, and I hope to be ableto fix upon their 

 attention, if I may by a brief word, this idea) — there is a fixed, 

 inevitable order, that cannot be transgressed with snccess. Let 

 me illustrate what I mean. The very first science that is ever 

 developed in a connected scheme is that of logic, or the science of 

 reasoning. We are so constituted that we cannot help reasoning; 

 one mind reasons as another does under the same "conditions. That 

 is, all men's intellects work in precisely the same way, under pre- 

 cisely similar conditions, and when they carry out their legitimate 

 work it becomes logic ; and when it is first applied to number, or 

 to reasoning in number, it gives rise to arithmetic; arithmetic 

 applied to reasoning in quantity gives rise to algebra; and this 



