FUTURE OF AGRICULTURE. 369 



they can no longer improve upon them. Tell them to educate 

 themselves for farming as a profession. Tell them the world 

 will instinctively award its honors, its dignities and its power, 

 not merely to those who are educated for the law, for divinity, 

 for medicine, for teaching, or for the counting-room, but to those 

 who are educated for their occupation. Tell them the profes- 

 sions, technically so called, have hitherto exerted an almost 

 unbounded influence on mankind, only because they have done 

 so much of the thinking for the world, have brought so large a 

 share of intellect to bear on the progress of the race. For these 

 reasons the world has bowed in reverence to their superiority of 

 intellect, and has given a prominence, not to law, medicine or 

 divinity, but to that intellectual culture which gives to life its 

 grace, its harmony and its beauty, and which they may acquire 

 as well as others. Tell them that science, stooping from its 

 proud flight among the clouds and the stars, has shed its genial 

 light around them and above. Tell them to-^learn of nature ; 

 to seek knowledge from the right hand and the left, and though 

 to attempt to learn all her laws and observe all her miracles may 

 seem as hopeless as to try to gather up all the pebbles on the 

 shore of the sea, yet in the enlargement and elevation of mind 

 which it will produce, every object will be clothed with the 

 perfection and beauty which it had when it came from the hand 

 of God! 



But so long as farmers think that nothing is wanting but 

 bone and muscle, strength of sinew and power of endurance ; 

 so long as they neglect all mental culture, and look with con- 

 tempt on all intelligent farming ; so long as they discard good 

 taste and good language and good manners as unnecessary ; so 

 long as they disregard all sentiment and all refinement, so long 

 will farming languish and be forced, by farmers themselves, to 

 take its place among the mere mechanical employments by the 

 side of machine and slave labor, when it might and ought to be 

 elevated and dignified, as worthy of the highest intelligence, as 

 opening the field on which human genius has some of its grand- 

 est triumphs to achieve ! 



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