RELATIONS OF SCIENCE TO AGRICULTURE. 25 



gates were Avatched and guarded by the very institution which 

 he scorned ! Meanwhile the grasshopper devours a dozen 

 agricultural departments every month, and the beetle asserts 

 the honor of the striped uniform, by spreading terror from 

 Colorado to Massachusetts. Surely science is worth a larger 

 endowment than she has ever dared to beg, if she can help us 

 here. 



Another misconception comes from the old impatience of 

 the world at the tardiness of results. To borrow a figure of 

 a vigorous writer, we are too fond of digging up our hopes 

 to see if they grow. We expect too much, and that too 

 soon, from our few experiments in the cultivation of economic 

 science. Such expectations are apt to end in the putting 

 forward of ill-considered theories and hasty suggestions, 

 alike dishonorable to science and injurious to the popular 

 verdict upon its worth. 



By a publication made in England while this address Avas 

 in preparation, I can illustrate this branch of my subject by 

 a noteworthy instance of a most delicate and abstruse method 

 of research in botany, yielding the practical results which 

 have long been sought for in the agriculture of two conti- 

 nents. The microscope, in its most modern and powerful 

 form, is now in constant use for the minute examination of the 

 invisible structure of animals and plants. Many things which 

 live, and are powerful by their numbers, are individually 

 only to be recognized or described under the lens. Their 

 germs, which are smaller still, contain in their structure and 

 development the secret of their bane or blessing to the world. 

 It is a chamber most obscure and far removed from practical 

 life, as your first thought might say, which is here unlocked 

 by the optician's art. Yet the microscope has just achieved 

 an honorable fame from the value of one of its revelations. 



The potato murrain, as English authors call it, has for some 

 time been a most dreaded - pest in Europe and America. 

 Dark spots upon the leaves ; foliage and stems blackening and 

 decaying ; the tuber corrupted by the same hidden cause, and 

 dissolving in a fetid slime ; these are the well-known symp- 

 toms of the disease. The evil has been found to be a 

 delicate Avhite mould, whose threads mine and exhaust the 

 plant. Such moulds are among the worst precursors of 



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