230 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



culture seem to be exhausted, and I dare not venture upon 

 either a repetition of what has been said here, or upon still 

 further investigation upon matters which have been subjected 

 to your own exhaustive inquiries, and so remembering that it 

 was the establishment of a Board of Agriculture in England 

 which first introduced scientific principles into the practice of 

 farming, and gave Sir Humphrey Davy his first opportunity for 

 useful service in this direction, I propose to lay before you 

 the steps by which man has arrived at the possibility of this 

 connection between science and the practical affairs of life. 

 The way has not been easy. Three centuries ago the educated 

 mind of the world had rejected the very foundations of such a 

 connection ; and it is a matter of special interest to us to know 

 the process by which this scientific possibility has been reached. 

 Now, the great feature of our day is, that every where- in culti- 

 vated and civilized society may be found an intense and serious 

 effort to infuse the accuracy of scientific investigation into all 

 practical affairs, and into the broad foundations of the Church 

 and the State. Turn your eyes in any direction, and you will 

 find the most powerful human intellect engaged in this labor. 



The scientific period has arrived. The profound and masterly 

 minds of the age — Humboldt just now gone, Agassiz resting 

 for an hour only, as we trust, to return with renewed vigor to 

 his imperial career in the realms of science, and their great 

 investigating fraternity on both continents — have placed science 

 at last in the divine regions of human genius, once occupied by 

 the poets and historians, and orators and philosophers, who so 

 long enjoyed undisputed sway as masters of human thought. 

 The prediction made by Dr. Young, in the latter part of the 

 last century, — a prediction then, and a familiar reality now, — 

 has been more than fulfilled. Remembering, as he did, that 

 " the last two hundred years have done much more for the pro- 

 motion of knowledge, than the two thousand years which pre- 

 ceded them," he says : " We have therefore the satisfaction of 

 viewing the knowledge of nature not only in a state of advance- 

 ment, but even advancing with increasing rapidity ; and the 

 universal diffusion of a taste for science appears to promise, 

 that, as the number of its cultivators increases, new facts will 

 be continually discovered, and those which are already known, 

 will be better understood and more beneficially applied." And 



