250 SELECTIONS FROM ADDRESSES. 



Indeed, the most valued results of some of them have only been 

 obtained within a few years ; and hitherto, no thorough attempt 

 has been made, to ingraft them upon our system of school edu- 

 cation. 



Bear with me then, respected friends, while I hold up a few 

 aspects of that want of knowledge, which appears to stand in 

 the way of your realizing many of the improvements at which 

 your organization aims. It would be an easier, and in some 

 respects a more grateful task, to recount the progress that indi- 

 viduals among us are making, and to exult in our present attain- 

 ments and future prospects ; but I think you will agree with 

 me, that it might not bear so hopefully on the future, as the less 

 pleasing duty now proposed. 



In the first place, then, the cultivator of the soil is not ac- 

 quainted with that internal constitution of matter that makes 

 it what it is in itself, or with those forces acting upon it, which 

 make it what it is in the various uses he has occasion to make 

 of it. While he recognizes a few species of matter, such as iron, 

 lead, copper, sulphur, and charcoal, which he cannot help re- 

 garding as undecomposable into any thing simpler ; the ques- 

 tion never occurs, how the case stands in respect to air, water, 

 clay, sand, vegetable mould, woody fibre, starch, sugar, oil, and 

 bone, with the whole crowd of familiar substances by which we 

 are surrounded. Indeed, to persons unacquainted with chemis- 

 try, the very idea of an element is a mystery in itself; while, 

 as a matter of course, they can know nothing of their number, 

 or comparative importance in nature ; and still less, of the rea- 

 sons for believing that they remain to this day, in the number 

 and shape of their final atoms, the same as in their first crea- 

 tion. Out of the thirty or forty of these elements, necessary to 

 be known, in order to comprehend the constitution of ordinary 

 matter, how small a number has the farmer been permitted to 

 see in an insulated shape, and in those he has accidentally seen, 

 how rarely has he recognized this elementary character ! Equally 

 unconscious is he of the fact, that these elements, if brought in- 

 to contact with each other, possess, in various but perfectly de- 

 terminate degrees, the power of interunion; so that two or 

 three different elements rush into an intimate combination, with 



