52 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



PROGRESS OF FARMING. 



From au Address before the Ilousatonic Agricultural Society. 



UY IIKNRY W. BISHOP. 



Iii their new companionship, labor and knowledge will 

 mutually aid and amuse each other. The workman will be a 

 geologist ; his mattock, a hammer ; the cornfield, a laboratory ; 

 and he who folds and feeds, as curious to know of organisms 

 and their functions, as he who cuts to cure them. The old 

 fears and superstitions have not vexed and checked the march 

 of these new sciences. The first alarmed, but not much — the 

 old interpreters of Genesis. The others were slightly suspected 

 of material proclivities. Honest inquiry did its appropriate 

 work, and the heralds of science and the heralds of salvation, 

 though in province apart, find these truths in harmony, and 

 converging to the same fountain of power and wisdom and 

 love ; collision is succeeded by concurrent effort for the same 

 end — a higher civilization — a better condition of soul, body 

 and estate. 



With this cooperation of will and way, of head, heart, "and 

 hands, is there any thing to check progression, except the 

 perplexities incident to all investigation ? Examine in detail 

 the discoveries and the changes wrought by them, and it will 

 be apparent that this department of the science of nature, in 

 rapidity of development, and variety of application, has been 

 outstripped by no other. Where it touches, it electrifies, 

 extending the boundaries of knowledge, and the range of 

 industry. Carbon, in its connection with growth and fertility, 

 is a subject for both ploughman and grazier. It enters into 

 the structure of the grasses and the cereals, and all that live 

 upon them. If it was formerly known as a constituent, the 

 conditions fitting it for the animal and vegetable tissues were 

 not. The air was supposed an element, and the only perma- 

 nently clastic fluid, mingling with itself, by chance, substances 

 as light as, or lighter than, its own. This was considered to 



