Ho who has not road and thought upon the subject is 

 likely to be startled at the asjertion of profound and 

 learned men, that the oldest pursuit of the human race 

 has been the slowest in its scientific developement, and 

 that, although the art of agrie ulture has been practiced 

 with success for many thousand years, the science of 

 agriculture is of recent origin and dates back but little 

 more than a century. But strange as the assertion may 

 seem, and unwilling as we may be to give it our full 

 assent, yet the more thoroughly and candidly we investi- 

 gate and study it, the more strongly we become con- 

 vinced of its probable truth. 



The reflections that arise upon a consideration of this 

 fact, if fact it be, instead of being gloomy and despond- 

 ent are precisely the reverse. Instead of being dis- 

 couraged by the slow progress formerly made through 

 so many centuries, we naturally say that if agriculture 

 thrived and grew while laboring under the disadvantages 

 of imperfect knowledge and unscientific methods, what 

 must be its progress in the future when aided by the dis- 

 coveries and application of science, the general dissemi- 

 nation of knowledge and the combined efforts of able, 

 earnest and instructed minds. It is the utterance of a 

 truism to say that the human intellect is limited in its 

 scope, but it is no less true to affirm that in no depart- 

 ment whatever of knowledge has it reached its limit. 

 And certainly he would be a most short sighted reasoner 

 who should affirm that agriculture is an exception to the 

 general rule of progress, and that in respect to it there 

 is nothing more to learn. It would be much more philo- 

 sophical to conclude that old as it is in years it is yet in 

 its infancy. 



That the cultivation of various parts of the earth was 

 successfully carried on in very ancient times, is manifest 

 from the historic fact of their great populations, whose 

 food must have been mainly supplied by a productive 



