40 



ranges over a difference of five or ten pounds' weight to 

 the bushel. Now, it is not till you have brought into 

 your registration each of these twenty-three specifications 

 that you can be said to have furnished returns of this crop 

 of wheat. There is not one of them, which a thorough- 

 bred scientific manipulator, if the case were transferred to 

 the laboratory, w^ould not despise himself for leaving out. 



The same necessity for thoroughness exists in all other 

 branches of the business. AVhen you take up a lump of 

 premium butter, you have hold of what seems to be a very 

 simple, home-made fact, and a very pleasant one. But 

 this fact has an antecedent biography, — and before the 

 oily cake has slipped through your fingers, or elsewhere, 

 if you are a good farmer, and a good Yankee, you have 

 at least a dozen questions to ask about it, — how the fact 

 has come to be, — all the way from the cow and the cow's 

 mother, and grandparents, on to the toast. You want a 

 written natural history of this lump, ah ovo usque ad ma- 

 lum. 



Nor is farming singular, in this respect, among the 

 sciences. Look at the nicety of astronomical calculations. 

 Look at the minute mixtures of the chemist. Look at the 

 hair-balances, and tests of exquisite delicacy, in every phi- 

 losophical apparatus. Observe the almost awful precision 

 exacted in clinical surgery. Furnish a Herschell's dis- 

 coveries without the achromatic lens and infallible mount- 

 ings of his telescope and siderial clock, with the horizontal 

 and vertical adjustments of transit instruments, air-bubble 

 and spider-lines ; conceive of a Bergman's or Faraday's 

 analyses, without atomic weights and unimpcacliable tables 

 and mathematical proportions, and you may expect a 

 perfectly intelligent agriculture, without this sharp in- 

 spection, and these unquestionable statistics. Why should 

 you desire exemption from them? They are what invest 

 your calling with its lasting interest, — its intellectual 



