AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE " 443 



limits were maiked out by a plow, as ^[ominsen tells us, to indicate the 

 debt which every industry owes to this primal industry. When that 

 nation took Cartliajie, the Senate ordered the immediate translation of an 

 agricultui-al work found in the captured city, for the use of the farmers 

 of Italy. The most ancient civilizations of tlie world were planted on the 

 rich alluvium of the Nile, the Euphrates, the Indus, the Yangt^e-Kiang 

 and other great rivers where this mother of arts could be nurtured and 

 made to provide for the essential and unceasing wants of humanity. The 

 fat S'-.il of ThesKaly noiu'ished the first civilization of (Jreece; the germ of 

 the Roman Republic and of the world-wide empire that succeeded, was 

 first set in the then rich lands surrounding the Tiber. That agric liture 

 still remains the mother of industry goes without saying. She needs 

 none of our praise; she speaks for herself. Her long and unvarying record 

 of indispensable beneficence is written in the whole history of man. 

 Without her, all other industries would languish and die. They must all 

 be covered and brooded under her maternal wing or else perisli. In caring 

 for her progeny, the other arts, we cannot afford to neglect her. And 

 yet when an accusation is brought for her neglect, must not the present 

 age, so noted for its enterprise in expanding other industrit s. plead guilty, 

 at least on manv counts of the indictment? 



FARMING INTEREST NOW DECLINING. 



Some countries may prove to be exceptions, but in our own and most 

 European nations, there is a general complaint that agricultural industry, 

 for some time past, has been on a decline. Great as have been the 

 improvements in agricultural machinery. and implements, extensive as 

 have been the new appliances of science to this industry, it has not kept 

 pace with manufactures as a source of remunerative wealth. England 

 finds that her w^heat area, within the last half century, has been reduced 

 from 4,000.(100 to 2,000.000 acres, and :Mr. :Nrulhairs figures show ns that 

 our middle States, consisting of New York New -Jersey, Pennsylvania, 

 Delaware and Mai-yland, with the District of (J'oluml)ia, having an esti- 

 mated population cf over 1(),000,000 do not raise enough food for the State 

 of Pennsylvania with an estimated population of a trifle over 0,000,000. 

 Of course, it may be replied that agriculture has sought more congenial 

 fields, that it has occupied the newer regions of our own west, or of vSouth 

 America, Australia or other remote lands, but this fact does not wholly 

 account for the startling rev(dation that our farming industry has under- 

 gone a most serious depression which threatens to be still more serious, 

 unless efficient measures are taken to arrest it, A writer in an English 

 magazine quotes a suggestive statement from the last report of the con- 

 sulting chemist, Mr. F. J. Lloyd, to the I^ritish Dairy Farmers' Associa- 

 tion, who savs: 



"I venture to think that Avhen the history of agriculture in the nine- 

 teenth century shall be written, one of the most remarkable facts to be 

 recorded, will be this: While every other industry made strides of 

 progress by the aid of science, and every agricultural soci(4y put scientific 

 advice and aid at the disposal of its members, the farmers of England 

 utterly ignored their aid and allowed the very science which was ready to 

 hel]) them, to be utilized by their competitors, until all the best markets 

 for their produce had been lost ;;nd they had become bankrupt." 



