SCIENCES APPLICABLE TO PARMINCx. 55 



trust has gone by, certainly among the enlightened farmers of this 

 great valley, when men reject and treat contomptnously wlmt 

 has been called book farming-; by which I understand farming 

 on scientific principles. Such farming has done too much, both 

 in Europe and this country, to be any longer despised, or even 

 looked upon with scepticism. The many agricultural societies, 

 on both sides of the Atlantic, so prolific of good, are based 

 upon science, and would be almost useless without it ; and the 

 numerous journals of agriculture now published, derive their 

 chief and most valuable matter from the applications of science 

 to cultivation. Indeed, it is scientific agriculture that enables 

 twenty millions of people to subsist in Great Britain on the 

 same soil, which in 1780, sustained only nine millions. The 

 Highland Agricultural Society, in Scotland, especially, has done 

 wonders, when we consider that no country is more bleak and 

 barren in Europe ; yet it now has reached a very high state of 

 agricultural prosperity, and chiefly through the influence of 

 that society, now seventy-six years old. The average produce of 

 wheat in the whole of Great Britain was formerly but nine 

 bushels to the acre ; but it is now more than nineteen bushels, 

 and in several counties of England and Scotland, the average 

 is not less than fifty luishels. 



" On the continent," says a traveller, " especially in Germany, 

 their annual fairs bring together the farmers and peasants of 

 all the surrounding country, when their ambition and industry 

 are stimulated Ijy a variety of fetes and the distribution of 

 prizes to successful competitors ; and whilst princes, dukes and 

 barons are engaged in awarding prizes to those who have been 

 most successful in the cultivation of grains and cattle, their 

 lovely wives are occupied in a humble but much more lovely 

 scene, in complimenting and distributing premiums to the 

 industrious housewife, for lier fine specimens of fruit, her 

 butter and cheese, her linen clothes, weaving, knitting and 

 otlier manufactures. I have no doubt I shall be ridiculed for 

 my want of taste, when I state, that to me the Grand Duchess 

 of Baden, presenting a silver cup to a peasant girl, before" an 

 assembled crowd of farmers and nobility, for the finest speci- 

 men of manufactured gloves, was a more interesting sight than 

 that of the gay Queen Victoria, racing through St. James's Park, 



