22 THE NEW AGRICULTURE. 



acquired in the classroom ; they are provided with improved 

 buildings, in many cases ideally adapted to the purposes for 

 which they were constructed ; they are granted large means for 

 the prosecution of their work ; they are equipped with precise 

 instruments and all the paraphernalia requisite for the success- 

 ful prosecution of scientific investigation ; and they are manned 

 by scholarly and competent men who are imbued with the im- 

 portance and the possibilities of their positions. 



The progress in other lines of human activity has had its 

 influence upon agriculture. If men have found secrets in the 

 sea and in the stars and in the ether which fills the interstices 

 between the atoms of the air as water might fill the space in a 

 barrel of bullets, the soil also has been searched for its mys- 

 teries, and is being made to yield them, too, in a truly wonder- 

 ful manner. Lands which were not only thought worthless, 

 but which were really so, are now made to bloom and blossom 

 as the rose. Roads which were almost always bad, and at 

 times impassable and considered impracticable of improvement, 

 are now transformed by the magic of mind and muscle into 

 highways of profit and delight. Frosts are defied by new vari- 

 eties of fruits and grain which live and thrive and mature 

 into money where their predecessors wilted and died under 

 the blighting breath of a providence which they could not 

 withstand, to the discouragement, and sometimes to the de- 

 spair, of the husbandman. The cactus, that abundant but use- 

 less growth of the desert, has but recently been rendered a 

 delicious fruif capable of being grown throughout the length 

 and breadth of the continent, and not only has the noxious 

 herb been transformed into a valuable food for man and beast, 

 but the same skill and scientific treatment which has been effi- 

 cacious for this amazing transformation has also removed the 



