Agriculture and Chemistry. 287 
upon ; another, in which principles are investigated and re- 
sults explained, and the resources of one branch of know- 
ledge made to contribute to the advancement of another. 
This is the period in which science, properly so called, is 
brought to improve the arts; and this is the period in which 
the arts are enabled to achieve their most memorable 
triumphs. Past generations, as well as we, could strip. the 
flax of its fibres, and the cotton seeds of their covering, and 
weave them into raiment; but it was reserved for mechani- 
cal science to construct for these ends machines, so beautiful 
and wonderful, that they seem instinct with life. And have 
we not ourselves lived to witness inventions that may be 
termed the triumph of knowledge; and these continually 
multiplying, each discovery giving rise to a train of others ? 
This is the result of science applied to the arts; and can we 
suppose that agriculture can be exempt from the like ana- 
logy, and fail to profit by the means by which so many other 
arts have been perfected? We should distrust the whole 
history of inventions, if we should come to such a conclusion. 
Agriculture has, indeed, peculiarities which modify, in man- 
ner and degree, the means by which the sciences can be made 
to react upon it. Being the first and most necessary of the 
arts, it was, we may suppose, the earliest cultivated, and has 
been the longest pursued, and so perhaps sooner brought to 
a certain degree of perfection than many others. From this 
cause, it seems to have been brought very early to a condi- 
tion which even now we may wonder at. The Roman agri- 
culture, as we know from authorities that have come down 
to us,—the Catos, the Virgils, the Columellas, the Plinys,— 
of former ages, was not inferior to that of the finest parts of 
_ modern Italy, and superior, certainly, to that of many parts of 
the British islands at the present day. The state of the same 
art in the countries of the East, where the habits of men do 
not change from age to age, as in the great empire of China, 
where scarcely anything that can bear the name of science 
is cultivated, evinces to us that agriculture had, like the 
_ sister art of gardening, been brought to a degree of excel- 
_ lence before the sciences, properly so called, had been applied 
to the investigation of principles. The use of the plough, 
