422 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



vades the arts, giving them dignity and efficiency, and how the arts ntilize 

 science in its various minutiae and support it in hcaltliy growth. Evei'v person 

 can add from his own experience and knowledge abundance of illustrations. 

 If agriculture has owed less than other arts in tlie past, it has been because of 

 a forced separation under a too nari'ow view of tlie art, or a faulty conception 

 of the possibilities in science applied to the soil. Yet even here there is enough 

 to encourage the most doubtful in an effort for closer union. The oft-noted 

 failures in so-called book-farming are themselves a proof of the need of a 

 proper combination of science and art in this calling. Any effort to treat a 

 general principle as a practical rule, to be followed in all conditions, is trying 

 to use science as an art; and any effort to extend a practical rule of a certain 

 experience into a general principle is to misuse an art by treating it as science. 

 Botli these efforts cause failures — loss of wealth, loss of hope and loss of faith 

 — and both are the result of imperfectly mastered science or poorly developed 

 skill. Sometimes chemical and botanical science have wandered into vain 

 speculations as to agriculture, simply because practice lagged too far behind to 

 keep these sciences on their mettle. Sometimes a practical rule of merit has 

 been too hastily thrown aside or disputed, simply because it was stated as a 

 principle. The question of deep and shallow plowing, so often bantered about 

 in farmers' clubs and agricultural journals, is usually stated as a question of 

 science; but each individual's answer to the question is simply a part of his 

 rule of conduct for a successful crop. As experience, it forms one item of 

 value among a long list to be grouped around the underlying principles of veg- 

 etable growth. The same may be said for the ever reviving chess controversy. 

 So long as a practical wheat grower holds to the statement that if he himself 

 suffers in his wheat field a certain amount of trampling or frost, it will pro- 

 duce for him a crop of chess, he is doubtless correct, for he is giving only a 

 rule for his own proper guidance. When he merely changes tlie jierson and 

 says, " If you treat your wheat field in this way it will produce chess," he may 

 or may not be correct, according to varying conditions of clean seed or clean 

 soil. But when ho states that the wheat plant turns into a chess plant under 

 such treatment, he has put his very sound rule into form of a very unsound 

 principle. His successful art makes very unsuccessful science, and all are the 

 losers by such an unnecessary strain. 



And yet these very controversies, so misunderstood, are a testimony to the 

 close relations of principles and practice ; tliougli each may stand jealously 

 aloof from the other when formally introduced, they are tiie nearest and most 

 intimate of neighbors. The fact is that an effort at knowledge of the unwaver- 

 ing laws of nature is as natural as breathing, and tiie most narrow experience 

 is most likely to be confounded with their discovery. A lesson of my youth at 

 another's expense has saved me from some such blunders: — A neighbor was 

 threshing for us, in the old, unscientific way of thumping tlie floor with a flail, 

 and as we turned the bundles or bound the straw, he entertained us boys with 

 wondrous tales of his skill in horse-breaking. lie was a "scienced colt-tamer " 

 beyond a doubt. But science unapplied we are all dissatisfied with, if we do not 

 distrust it; and since we had the materials at hand for a test, it must be tried. 

 The colt, a wiry, wily thoroughbred, was led into the yard, where our confident 

 man of skill prepared to mount him. The reins were gathered as if to mount 

 a lady's i)ony; there was a confident spring of the man, a single plunge of the 

 horse, a somersault over fifteen feet of earth, and a bruised horse-tamer, stiffly 

 picking himself up with the remark, — ever since a by-word in our family, 

 "Jones' colt never made no such motions as that." The colt awaited the 



