IXTRODUCTIOX. 21 



No one who has carefully watched this progress in Agricul- 

 ture, for the last few years, can have failed to observe that it is 

 constantly growing more scientific, thdugh not, perhaps, less 

 practical. Its standard is continually becoming ^jiigher. It is 

 now the aim of all intelligent farmers to unite science and prac- 

 tical skill. These two powers are not antagonistic, but each 

 will aid the other, and by their help we may make ourselves 

 familiar with the mysteries of nature and remove the worst 

 difficulties which have beset the farmer in his work. The 

 thinker in his closet, the chemist over his crucibles, and tho 

 earnest experimenter in the field, are laboring together for the 

 discovery of truth, and it is only by their united efforts that 

 the highest truth can be obtained. 



The tendency of the age is to change. All educational sys- 

 tems are changing. Scholastic and monastic education i \an- 

 ishing, and even purely literary culture is waning to make way 

 for more practical, more active, more scientific instruction, an 

 instruction which shall have a more direct bearing upon the 

 work of everyday life, and the time will, perhaps, come, 'when 

 even the children in our common schools will be taught to 

 recognize and to know by sight all the stones upon which tbev 

 tread, all the plants, and animals, and reptiles, and birds, and 

 insects which are to be found in their neighborhood, so thai 

 they will go better prepared to the higher schools of science. 

 The study of nature, in a word, will lie nearer the foundation 

 of our school system, and so permeate all our higher institutes 

 of instruction till our literature becomes more agricultural in 

 its character, for what branch of natural history is not linked 

 and interwoven with the farm itself, and what better prepara- 

 tion could there be, for. that practical training which our age 

 demands? The time may, indeed, come, when mathematics. 

 when geometry, when astronomy, will be taught by men who 



