INTELLECT IN AGRICULTURE. 199 



By-and-by, it will be generally realized that few 

 men live or have lived who cannot find scope and 

 profitable employment for all their intellect on a two- 

 hundred-acre farm. And then the farmer will select 

 the brightest of his sons to follow him in the manage- 

 ment and cultivation of the paternal acres, leaving 

 those of inferior ability to seek fortune in pursuits 

 for which a limited and special capacity will serve, if 

 not suffice. And then we shall have an Agriculture 

 worthy of our country and the age. 



Meantime, let us make the most of what we have, 

 by diffusing, studying, discussing, criticizing, Liebig's 

 Agricultural Chemistry, Dana's Muck Manual, "War- 

 ing's Elements, and the books that each treat more 

 especially of some department of the farmer's art, 

 and so making ourselves familiar, first, with the 

 principles, then with the methods, of scientific, effi- 

 cient, successful husbandry. Let us, who love it, 

 treat Agriculture as the elevated, ennobling pursuit 

 it might and should be, and thus exalt it in the esti- 

 mation of the entire community. 



"We may, at all events, be sure of this : Just so 

 fast and so far as farming is rendered an intellectual 

 pursuit, it will attract and retain the strongest minds, 

 the best abilities, of the human race. It has been 

 widely shunned and escaped from, mainly because it 

 has seemed a calling in which only inferior capacities 

 were required or would be rewarded. Let this error 

 give place to the truth, and Agriculture will win vo- 

 taries from among the brightest intellects of the race. 



