HINDRANCES AND HELPS. 223 



Agricultural Chemistry. 



WHEN a man buys clean copies of Liebig and 

 of Boussingault, and walks into possession 

 of his land with the books under his arm, and an 

 assured conviction that with their aid, he is about to 

 supplant altogether the old practice, and commit 

 havoc with old theories, and raise stupendous crops, 

 and drive all his old-fashioned neighbors to the wall, 

 he is laboring under a mistake. His calves will very 

 likely take the scours ; the cut-worms will slice off 

 his phosphated corn ; the Irish maid will pound his 

 cream into a frothy chowder ; in which events he 

 will probably lose his temper ; or, if a cool man, will 

 retire under a tree, and read a fresh chapter out of 

 Liebig. 



There are a great many contingencies about 

 farming, which chemistry does not cover, and proba 

 bly never will. People talk of agricultural chemistry 

 as if it were a special chemistry for the farmer s 

 advantage. The truth is (and it was well set forth, I 

 remember, in a lecture of Professor Johnson s), there 

 is no such thing as agricultural chemistry; and the 

 term is not only a misnomer, but misleads egregious- 

 ly. There is no more a chemistry of agriculture than 

 there is a chemistry of horse-flesh, or a conchology 

 of egg-shells. Chemistry concerns all organic and 



