INTRODUCTION. 



I believe that the country which God made is more beautiful than 

 the city which man made; that life out of doors and in touch with the 

 earth is the natural life of man. I believe that work is work wherever 

 I find it, but that work with Nature is more inspiring than work with 

 the most intricate machinery. I believe that the dignity of labor depends 

 not on what you do, but on how you do it ; that opportunity comes to a 

 boy on the farm as often as to a boy in the city, that life is larger and 

 freer and happier on the farm than in the town, that my success depends 

 not upon my location, but upon myself not upon my dreams, but upon 

 what I actually do, not upon luck, but upon pluck. I believe in working 

 when you work, and in playing when you play, and in giving and demand- 

 ing a square deal in every act of life. Edwin Osgood Grover. 



The truth is that even the simplest facts of chemistry and biology; 

 facts which confront us every day of our lives, whatever our calling or 

 vocation; facts upon the correct interpretation of which life itself may 

 turn and does turn in countless thousands of cases every day, are still 

 considered unworthy of attention in too large a proportion of our 

 schools, as compared with the solution of mathematical puzzles and the 

 raking over of linguistic rubbislh heaps. Few farmers who have reached 

 the middle period of life had the slightest encouragement in common 

 school or high school to investigate their relationship to natural 

 phenomena, and' even the very few who found their way to college fared 

 little better. The consequence is that the natural facts which are in- 

 definitely simpler and more easy of comprehension than the extraction of 

 square root in arithmetic or the solution of quadratic equations in algebra, 

 and the correct understanding of which would be worth a thousand times 

 more to the average individual than the ability to read at sight all the 

 languages that have ever been spoken and forgotten, are yet sealed 

 mysteries to the great majority of even the better educated portion of 

 mankind. Chas. E. Thome. 



Agriculture is Both a Science and an Art. 



"Agriculture is the foundation of commerce." Gibbon. 



Agriculture is the science that teaches the most perfect and 

 most profitable means of producing plants and animals. It is 



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