-1859] WRITINGS OF JOSEPH HENRY. 35 



for US to ascertain the natural limits, if there are any, to the 

 arable portion of our still untenanted possessions, and to de- 

 termine, if possible, what parts of it are best fitted by climate 

 and soil for the future operations of the husbandman. The 

 data do not exist at present for the definite solution of this 

 problem; but it is one object of the systems of meteorology 

 now in operation in this country to collect the facts by 

 which it may be fully solved. In the United States agri- 

 culture as a science has been up to this time of compara- 

 tively little importance; refined processes of cultivation are 

 not required where the products of millions of acres of vir- 

 gin soil can be gathered without skill and with compara- 

 tively little labor. It is only when the organic power and 

 material which Nature has thus stored up in the primitive 

 earth have been to a greater or less extent exhausted, that 

 scientific processes must be adopted in order to secure the 

 continued production of ample harvests. The time is at 

 hand when scientific agriculture can no longer be neglected 

 by us; for however large our domain really is, and however 

 inexhaustible it may have been represented to be, a sober 

 deduction from the facts which have accumulated during 

 the last few years will show that we are nearer the confines 

 of the healthy expansion of our agricultural operations over 

 new ground than those who have not paid careful attention 

 to the subject could readily imagine. We think it will be 

 found a wiser policy to develop more fully the agricultural 

 resources of the States and Territories bordering on the Mis- 

 sissippi, than to attempt the further invasion of the sterile 

 waste that lies beyond. 



The laws of nature are all simple and readily compre- 

 hended by a mind of ordinary capacity, when separately an- 

 nounced; but when the conditions under which they operate 

 are varied, and a number of forces are called into action, the 

 resulting phenomena frequently become so complex that 

 their investigation transcends not only the ordinary logic of 

 the most gifted mind, but even the more powerful analysis of 

 the mathematician. It has been well said by Professor Ben- 

 jamin Peirce, of Cambridge, that had the lot of man been cast 



