YALE SCIENTIFIC SCHOOL 97 



I hope you will, if possible, accept the invitation that you 

 may thus become known to our Society. I brought the sub- 

 ject today, for the first time, of your employment as State 

 Chemist, before the Board in an informal manner. It was 

 well received. ... In the mean time, if you can give us the 

 proposed address it will help us along very essentially. 



In response to the desire of his friends, Mr. John- 

 son delivered an address before the New York State 

 Agricultural Society at Albany on February 13, 1856, 

 under the title, "The Relations which exist between 

 Science and Agriculture." The main points which he 

 emphasized are here given in his own words : 



It has been the success that has followed the application 

 of science to manufacturing arts which has aroused the hope 

 that she may contribute to the advancement of agriculture. 

 It is especially the science of chemistry that has now become 

 the signal means of improvement in a hundred branches of 

 industry, not less than the basis on which alone they can 

 securely rest. . . . Why has not agriculture shared in this 

 progress? I answer, it has shared therein, though to a less 

 striking and less profitable degree. The arts to which allu- 

 sion has been made mostly involve only dead or inorganic 

 matter, and their study, thus withdrawn from the dominion 

 of all but the chemical forces, is very easy compared with the 

 investigation of the problems of agriculture which are, of all 

 others, the most complex and difficult. . . . 



But there are other reasons than the inherent difficulty of 

 the subject which have prevented the more rapid develop- 

 ment of agricultural science, reasons which lie in agriculture 

 itself as it is, in agricultural practice. One of these is the 

 lamentable circumstance that our agriculture is so barren of 

 facts; I mean that kind of facts which only can form the 

 foundation of science, I mean complete facts. Complete facts 

 are the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. 



