1882.] EXPERIMENTS WITH FERTILIZERS. 367 



ment and help could be furnished. Unfortunately very few farmers 

 can afford to both pay the bills and do the work. A few hundred 

 dollars invested in sets of experimental fertilizers, to be placed in 

 the hands of proper men, would secure a vast amount of intelligent, 

 faithful, useful work, and the benefit to the agriculture of Con- 

 necticut and the country at large, would be very great. 



From all around us comes the complaint that the boys are leav- 

 ing the farms; that the old homesteads are deserted; that the 

 sturdy, native stock which has given us our material, our intellectual 

 and our moral strength, is running out; that foreigners with lower 

 ideals of life and character and less capacity for progress are com- 

 ing in, and that, unless something happens to change the current, 

 our old land -marks, our great influence, our sterling character, 

 will be gradually swept away. I do not share these forebodings so 

 fully as many, because I believe the change will come. But it 

 cannot come without more rational as well as more profitable farm 

 practice; without increase of intellectual life, as well as of crops; 

 without better culture of the mind, as well as of the land. 



I was much struck the other day by a forcible remark of a 

 friend, who in speaking of farmers' clubs and the men who 

 support them, said: "Where there is one man talking in the 

 meeting, there are a hundred busily thinking at home. The 

 fact is, that we are in the midst of an awakening of agricultural 

 thought that is really phenomenal. With the thinking comes 

 improvement, better tillage, better crops, better stock, and better 

 profits, and what is best of all, a higher intellectual and, I trust, 

 moral life. The agencies that speed this movement, the forms of 

 nutriment on which it thrives are manifold. With the rest, such 

 men and such work as has been here referred to, are doing, I be- 

 lieve, not a little to help the good cause along. 



Had not the relation of this article to previous ones seemed to 

 call for the heading it has, it would have been entitled, "The Use 

 of Brains in Farming." 



