32 



may as well be confessed at once : Our progenitors liked 

 fighting one another better than fighting stumps and 

 swamps. That was the world's boyhood, and, like the 

 few boys left in our day, who are not oldish little men in 

 short clothes, those swift and supple sinews chose the bow 

 and spear, with the big wrestling-ground of barbarian 

 tribes, before the civilizing but rather fatiguing pickaxe 

 and shovel. A better excuse, I am inclined to think, 

 tliough far from a sufficient one, will be found in the 

 paradoxical circumstance, that the great advantage of 

 agricultural pursuits has been their great hindrance. I 

 mean the general independence they allow, as providing 

 in themselves the necessities of living. This supersedes 

 commerce, removes competition, and so tends to quench 

 enterprise. 



In affirming agricultural science to have passed through 

 its epoch of general discovery, however, I referred not so 

 much to the rude and slow advances it made for thousands 

 of years earlier, as to the more recent period when it took 

 a sudden start forward, and may be said to have first risen 

 into the dignity of an intellectual concern. These dis- 

 coveries moved in two directions, chemical and mechanical. 

 Chemistry applied analysis to the whole material of agri- 

 culture, plants and animals and all products, as well as 

 soils ; whereas the stupidity of ages had been taking it for 

 granted that, since all earth is earth, it matters nothing 

 what its elements are, so the seed be under ground. Mech- 

 anism stretched out its hand, and gave the husbandman 

 a new set of tools — a branch of the general turn for 

 mechanical invention and elaboration that has marked the 

 mental movement of the last hundred years. By both 

 these agencies, not only w^as a new principle introduced 

 into the action of agriculture, but at the same time accrued 

 an enlargement of its spirit and motive. 



Of course, at the first, chemistry did very little with her 



