OBSERVATION AND EXPERIMENT. 7 



food which has not first passed through the wonderful labora- 

 tory of animal or vegetable life. 



I shall lie pardoned by my audience for having dwelt some- 

 what at length on this subject, for I think it affords a striking 

 instance of a want in the community of correct observation and 

 thorough experiment. Correct observation would have brought 

 numerous instances to light in which fowls have readily pro- 

 duced the daily egg to order, properly cased in pure crystaline 

 white, without access to any lime whatever, the whole winter 

 through ; experiment would have taught that the natural 

 appetite of the fowl is satisfied when the minerals fed to them 

 are of convenient size, hard and angular, let the composition of 

 them be what it may. 



We can dwell but little longer on this division of our subject. 

 Who of my hearers, after having carefully studied an article in 

 our agricultural press detailing some interesting experiment, 

 has not often found it necessary to obtain from the writer of 

 that article more information before he could repeat the experi- 

 ment or know what value to set upon the apparent results ; 

 who has not found in such articles some wide, unbridged chasm 

 between his cause and effect or the mistaking of a sequence for 

 a consequence ? I repeat but an axiom when I say at this late 

 day, that the farmer needs a thorough education as much as 

 any other class in the community ; and to make the full, round, 

 thoroughly developed farmer, educated up to the full demands 

 that the calling has for his spiritual and intellectual nature, no 

 mechanical employment, no profession requires so thorough 

 and extended an education. No one can make the records of 

 observation and experiment a study without having an over- 

 powering sense of the grandeur and extent of the unexplored 

 world before him, and of the necessity of educated intellect to 

 filter out the crudities with which these records abound. 

 Truths in nature arc not to be so easily learned as the public 

 at large presume ; nature is coy of her secrets in proportion to 

 their value. Through a long, dark night of ignorance has the 

 careful student noted facts, and the philosophic sage compared 

 them in all their relations, and generalized with thoughtful 

 brow, but as yet the morning has hardly broken; knowledge in 

 agriculture appears as but a phantom, flitting in the dusky 



