138 On the Aj^jdicatlon 



with the industry, the dihgent attention, the dnergy which per- 

 vades the agricultural, no less than every other portion of the 

 British people, the most promising direction in which we may 

 hope to attain improvement is by arriving at more enlightened 

 views with respect to the principles of husbandry, a more thorough 

 understanding, of the nature of the soil we operate upon, and of 

 the agents by which its condition is to be ameliorated. 



It must be admitted, indeed, that there Avas at no period of 

 our history a greater disposition for making trial of new methods 

 of culture ; and, moreover, that the experiments most popular at 

 the present time are precisely those which have reference to the 

 action of chemical agents upon the soil. But, judging from those 

 cases which have fallen under my own personal observation, I 

 should be led to apprehend, that the unscientific manner in which 

 the investigations are oftentimes conducted, and the absence of 

 any leading principle in the selection of these fertilising agents, 

 or in their relative order of succession, have hitherto detracted 

 much from the value of the results obtained. 



I may be permitted perhaps to illustrate my meaning by re- 

 ference to another practical science, bearing some points of ana- 

 logy to that which we are now considering. Let us suppose a 

 physician, without being directed by any insight into the structure 

 and functions of the human frame, or into the chemical nature of 

 the drugs employed in medicine, to prescribe to his patients in- 

 discriminately the various articles of the ' Materia Medica ' in 

 succession, either singly or intermixed, noting down the results, 

 and communicating from time to time to the world the cases in 

 which he had fancied himself successful. Such a person, supposing 

 his practice sufficiently extensive to enable him to ring all the 

 changes of which the numerous medicinal agents at his command 

 admitted, might no doubt in time discover some valuable remedies, 

 provided only he were able to convey to others a correct idea of 

 the nature of the ailments, and of the kind of constitutions, in 

 which each particular mode of treatment had proved successful. 

 But supposing that the nomenclature of disease at the period in 

 which he lived was loose and uncertain, supposing that what was 

 called fever in one place was known by some different appellation 

 in another, I fear it would be difficult for him to render the in- 

 formation he had acquired available, except perhaps to those 

 wdthin the narrow limits of his own neighbourhood. His dis- 

 coveries, therefore, must either die with himself, or, if adopted 

 by others, must be expected to lead to many disappointments, 

 from the mistakes that would occur as to the kinds of disorder 

 they had been found calculated to remove. 



Now the present condition of agriculture does, I fear, in both 

 these respects, resemble that which I have just been delineating ; 



