PROGRESS OF FARMING. 



was in a measure solved when Davy chemically took to pici 

 the plants it made grow, and found gypsum in them ; a 

 subsequent experiment ascertained* that it had no appreciable 

 effeet on plants in which it was not found, and none, in which 

 it was found, where the soil had enough of free calcareous 

 matter in it before. 



Researches into the nature, constitution and final causes of 

 what is upon the earth's surface, where we live and work, have 

 resulted in capital discoveries, because conducted upon philo- 

 sophical principles. Sound senses are thought to be trust- 

 worthy, when cautiously and honestly used by a sane 

 understanding. Trusting to them, men have experimented, 

 noticed, recorded, collated and generalized facts. Honest 

 searchers have become severely studious, to find out the 

 qualities and properties — simple and combined — of the material 

 things with which kind Heaven has associated them, and what 

 those things were made for. Natural phenomena have been 

 taken from the custody of alchemy, astrology, and natural 

 magic, and passed to the truth-telling philosophy of nature. 

 War, with its arts, as a path of gain and glory is for the few. 

 The profits of the professions, called learned, arc not for the 

 multitude. Few have leisure — fewer taste, for the merely 

 speculative and absolute. Students of nature are neither 

 limited in number, disheartened by competition, embittered by 

 envy, nor bewildered by fanciful abstractions. Such student 

 has no strategy to practice, no specific to hide, no technical 

 traps to spring, no old dogmas to defend. He deals with tlie 

 fact and its law, and through the law he can foresee and 

 predict the fact, if as conversant with the law as he who knows 

 the path and speed of Venus, can tell where to find her. 



The application of these discoveries to the material interests 

 of civilization, of which the cultivation of the earth is most 

 prominent; wide-spread and useful, has all along been steady 

 and progressive, and given the dignity of science to occupations, 

 thought to need little else than strong muscles and practiced 

 hands. They have opened a wider sphere for intellectual 

 activity than was once thought possible, for some have broken 

 out too suddenly for anticipation. A widely diffuse literature, 

 as alluring and instructive, as exact thought and novel revela- 

 tions can make it, embodies them. Who now so obtuse as not 



