1856.] Our Farm Department 415 



the neighboring grocery, drinking and smoking, which would not only 

 be more rationally enjoyed and usefully spent in attending to these 

 minor and unimportant matters, (as many farmers are disposed to call 

 them,) but would save them from that vortex — intemperance, which 

 swallows up so many fond hopes and cherished anticipations. 



I am happy to say these rural embellishments are beginning to be 

 appreciated in many places, and all that it requires is that a taste for 

 them be cultivated among the young, soon to render them universal. 



©ur |arm ^tp^drtnunt. 



Our readers will be interested to know the progress of this new 

 department. 



We are now ready to enter upon the instructions and experiments 

 which have so long been deemed desirable fur the promotion of agri- 

 cultural science. 



Our laboratory is about completed, and provided with a large 

 amount of new and valuable apparatus for chemical analysis and 

 experiments. The building which has been constructed for this pur- 

 pose contains something more than a mere ordinary chemical labora- 

 tory. It is a beautiful architectural structure, embracing a suit of 

 rooms for the professors of the departments, viz: of chemistry, bot- 

 any and vegetable physiology, theoretical and practical agriculture, 

 and landscape gardening — four professors. A common lecture-room, 

 thirty feet square; a shop of like dimensions, furnished with forge, 

 anvil, turning-lathe, bench-planes; in short, all the means for making 

 and repairing apparatus. These, beside a chemical laboratory, sixty 

 by thirty, with rooms adjoining the one for a balance-room, and the 

 finer apparatus, and another for a furnace-room. The plumbing of 

 the laboratory is complete, a large tank furnishing the water, and 

 every student is provided with operating-stand, wash-bowl, water, 

 chemicals, etc., to go through with the various experiments. Every 

 student is to be an operator. 



This scientific building occupies a central position in the botanic 

 grounds, embracing twenty acres. These grounds are being laid out 

 under the direction of Mr. M. Gr. Kern, an experienced landscape 

 gardener, in a tasteful manner, and when completed are intended to 

 embrace every order, genus, and, as far as possible, species of trees, 



