576 More About Terra Culture. [December, 



of your solicitude, please name them, or any one in particular, and 

 I will answer you as fully as my experience will admit. 



Very respectfully, 



Daniel J. Cobb, M. D. 



From the numerous letters received in reply to our inquiries simi- 

 lar to the one above — uniformly favorable to the theory of Terra 

 Culture, in adddition to the results of experience made since hearing 

 its disclosure — I am induced to accredit much more to its claims, than 

 when first presented. Believing no theory valuable unless it will 

 stand the rigid test of analysis and experiment, our indorsement of 

 its claims will correspond with the number of well attested experi- 

 ments which go to establish such claims. Not that we shall scout 

 the candid, and deliberate, and well-formed opinions of others — by 

 no manner of means — for, if we can believe nothing except what we 

 have ocular demonstration to prove, a large amount of the informa- 

 tion we have, and upon which we daily rely, would be expunged 

 from our encyclopgedia, and all that is called science, must be made 

 to depend for its verities upon what we ourselves have successfully 

 and fully demonstrated. But our position is this : we are not satis- 

 fied to take for granted, upon the statement of another, where inter- 

 est, or caprice, or ignorance of the true cause, may have biased the 

 judgment, or greatly modified our conclusion. In agriculture, 

 especially, it is not difiicult to find a contrariety of views, on almost 

 any of its doctrines and practices ; and it is the easiest thing in the 

 world to secure testimonials. Look at the string of names to every 

 quack medicine that is brought to our notice. How many universal 

 catholicons to every disease and ailment that flesh is heir to. One 

 Avould think that Socrates knew not what he affirmed, when he 

 said ' There was no place out of Attica where people did not die,' 

 if we believed all that was said of the wondrous efi"ects of this or 

 that. Again, in agriculture, we are so subject to be imposed upon 

 by the sophism, which in the language of the logician, is called non 

 causa pro causa, or assigning as the cause of a result that which is 

 not the cause, that we are compelled to make great abatements in 

 the statements which are often made with great candor and plausi- 

 bility. 



Difi"erent minds view matters very differently, but when the case 

 is fully stated, the facts fully presented, it is our province to decide 

 accordingly ; and this is what we desire in relation to this, and every 



