i8 THE NEW AGRICULTURE. 



and sec the good things that are there and the better things that 

 are coining. 



We are at the beginning of an era wonderful in the annals 

 of agriculture ; an era in which experiment and foresight and 

 skill and invention and learning will transmute, as never before, 

 the labor bestowed upon the land into wealth and health and 

 happiness and length of days ; an era of progress and develop- 

 ment as wonderful as any that has hitherto astounded the world 

 in other departments of investigation and endeavor, in which 

 agriculture will, for progress, take her stand side by side with 

 the industry of shipbuilding, for instance, which has within a 

 comparatively few years reduced the time for crossing the At- 

 lantic from three months to less than twice that many days, and 

 increased the carrying capacity of single vessels from a few 

 hundreds to many thousands of tons ; by the side of railroading 

 in which speed and safety and capacity has, in each succeeding 

 year, laughed at the impossibilities of the year just gone ; by the 

 side of electrical development which, from a meagre beginning 

 of a generation ago, now renders us speechless in the presence 

 of its phenomena of light and heat and power, and other mani- 

 festations still more subtle and marvelous. 



In agriculture, the great mass of mankind have not looked 

 upon intelligence and mental training as of especial value. Too 

 many have thought of farmers as men "whose talk was of 

 oxen and whose employment was in their labours" ; have 

 thought of those "labours" as being drudgery for the most part, 

 and of financial returns so meagre as to render farming utterly 

 unattractive to any active man's contemplation. "By and by," 

 said a philosopher of the last generation, "by and by it will 

 be generally realized that few men live, or have lived, who 

 could not find scope for all their intellect on a two-hundred-acre 



