294 History of the English Landed Interest. 



Unwilling to be instructed by halves, and not to be baffled 

 without a further struggle, "he applied himself," he next tells 

 us, "with diligence to acquire a knowledge of those sciences that 

 seemed necessarj'' to be attained before he could peruse these 

 authors with profit." He was extremely mortified to find 

 that " almost all these writers were equally ignorant of the real 

 qualities of the substances, whose names they employed, as he 

 himself had been, and that each having formed in his own 

 mind a vague and indeterminate idea of some imaginary sub- 

 stance, endowed with as imaginary qualities, modelled by his 

 fancy so as exactly to suit the hypothesis he had assumed, 

 gave to it the name of salt, oil, acid, or any other that chanced 

 first to occur to his imagination, and then emploj'ed it on all 

 occasions to explain every difficulty that might occur with 

 regard to the theory or practice of Agriculture." Tired at 

 length with repeated and fruitless endeavours to attain useful 

 knowledge in this way, and disgusted with the nonsensical 

 jargon that he was obliged to read, he, in a sort of literary 

 apathy, threw aside his books, and resolved to disengage his 

 mind from theoretical reasoning as much as possible, and 

 " with an unprejudiced sincerity of intention attend to practice 

 alone as the only sure mode of instruction." 



Thus had Practice turned for help to Science and been 

 repulsed. She had asked for bread and she had received a 

 stone. The analytical chemist of the age was steeped to the 

 lips with error. Still, under the influence of the alchemist 

 school, he shrouded the discovery of any fresh truth with 

 mystical verbiage. Almost the only, certainly the chief, re- 

 agent of his laboratory was fire ; and it was long before the 

 malodorous messes which bubbled up and over the sides of his 

 crucible were to be replaced by the intelligent synthesis and 

 analysis of acid and test-tube. 



Leaving, therefore, the philosopher to pursue his sublime 

 speculations, our disappointed author looked around to see if 

 " in the more humble walk " of practice he could assist that 

 industry whose welfare he held so dear. He noticed how 

 isolated the husbandman was, how difficult it would be to get 

 at him, how easily he might neglect to profit by an invention 



