xviii Report to the Anniversari/ Meeting. 



fully sown, the young plant is up and thriving, and there is every 

 promise of an abundant harvest to be reaped in future years. 



The motto of the Society comprises, in the terms of its 

 enunciation, the vital germ of every progressive and stable im- 

 provement, not only in agricultural economy, but in every other 

 branch of national industry under the direction and control of 

 the mind ; and the union of practice and science constitutes 

 accordingly the perfection of our principles of action in every 

 department of good husbandry, the salutary restraints of the one 

 principle preventing the undue preponderance of the other. The 

 routine of local practice and the limited rules of cultivation un- 

 varyingly adopted and followed in particular districts, have at 

 length been found not only to be imperfect means for the attain- 

 ment of the end in view, but being confined to their own peculiar 

 case, they have had no general application, because founded on 

 no general principles. While, however, these local prejudices 

 have so long proved obstacles to improvement, and are necessarily 

 the result of the adoption of iJractice only, obsolete in its date, and 

 uncorrected by intelligent principles, the Council are most 

 anxious, at the present moment, to guard their members against 

 the opposite evil of the undue and arbitrary application of mere 

 unaided and theoretical science to the operations of agriculture. 

 It is the natural tendency of the human mind to run into extremes, 

 instead of holding the just balance of dispassionate reason in the 

 pursuit of its inquiries. No sooner are men convinced of one 

 error, than their liability to fall into an opposite one becomes 

 apparent; and in the case of agriculture, the prejudices of past 

 ages having given way before the salutary conviction of just 

 principles, it has naturally resulted that the evils of the present 

 day are those attendant on an incorrect or undue appreciation of 

 science itself, or of science falsely so called ; practice, in many 

 instances, instead of being enlightened or directed in its operations 

 by the guidance of novel and untried theories, being only found 

 to be disturbed in its course by the adoption of suggestions for 

 its improvement derived from a science hastily assumed to be 

 perfect while its very elementary truths are either distorted or 



