218 STATE BOARD OF AGEICULTURE. 



make all other studies a like food. It is not the bread that uonrishes, but the 

 blessing. It is not the text-book, but the man that determines the result of 

 intellectual digestion. Philosophy, even theology, may be pursued in a sordid 

 spirit, while pomology, zoology may receive the purest devotion to truth. 



I walked over acres of ripening peaches with its proprietor. Peaches were 

 made to eat. He knew the delicate flavor of his George the Fourth or his 

 Douay, but he f:eklom tasted a peach, — they had become common to him. 

 Peaches are made to sell. He understood his Hales, Crawfords, and Barnards. 

 But over and above all this he had otlier delights. In Avork well done ; in cul- 

 tivation that kept his grounds clean of weeds, in having his labor performed up 

 to the very requirement of his needs, in the success attending his efforts, there 

 was the gratification of mnch higher than mercenary desires. He enjoyed the 

 deliciousness of taste more in an aesthetic than in a sensuous way, and yet the 

 enjoyment was real. He saw beauty in form, in color, in fragrance in bloom, 

 in rows of well-formed trees, and delighted in that beauty ; and why should you 

 say tliat this a]ipreciation of beauty is not as pure and ennol^ling as iu looking 

 at a landscape painting of Cole, Turner, or Troyon? 



I walked about the farm and barns of a successful farmer in Oakland county. 

 As he showed me the barns he had planned with manifold peculiar conveniences, 

 the well cleared fields and farm roads, all of which had come from out a dense 

 forest, the product of labor, to be sure, but of labor joined Avitli tliought, and 

 with the creation and upholding of an ideal, I could see that the ideal, and the 

 partial success he had had in attaining it, were a much larger jjortion of his 

 daily enjoyment than was the competence he had acquired. Of course the com- 

 petence, the success, gave free scope to this higher enjoyment. That, indeed, is 

 the best use of materiabsnccess. 



The best promise of improved machinery is that it shall save time and 

 strength that may be u?:ed to develop an interior excellence and enjoyment. If 

 education and machinery will feed and clothe me in one half the time that was 

 required without them, I have so much more time and strength for the achieve- 

 ment of further success. So of the nation, provided always that moral develop- 

 ment keep pace with physical ; for otherwise time moans drunkenness and 

 rowdyism. Nothing is of more importance, therefore, tlian tliat that education 

 which can give emjiloyment to thought, to imagination, to taste, should keep 

 pace with physical developments in a nation. In trutli, sad to say, it always 

 lags far behind. 



But to return. These higher enjoyments are no exclusive prerogative of any 

 class. The pomologist, the wheat-grower, the stock-breeder in the midst of 

 his straight-back cattle, the machinist, the architect, are endowed with the same 

 truth-loving, beauty-seeing nature as the architect, the landscape gardener, and 

 the jJoet. 



And this nature finds play in a scientific course of study. The unity in vari- 

 ety that appears in the vegetable Avorld ; the development of a few primordial 

 forms into all the infinite diversity of slirub and tree and lesser plants ; the plan 

 of structure revealed in their comparison and classification ; the laws of growth, 

 fructification, and dissemination, — these intellectual parts are still more won- 

 derful than what appears to the eye, beautiful as may be the blossoms of trees 

 and flowering shrubs, or grand as are the monarchs of Mariposa. 



As for study for its own sake, surely literature can show no more disinterested 

 zeal than science in any of its departments. See Agassiz having, in his own 

 words, "no time to waste in making money." See Faraday casting aside the 



