14 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan. 



yearly?" Now, in the asking of that one question we have 

 the origin of the condition which leads to agricultural inves- 

 tigation and agricultural study, and we have the beginning 

 of agricultural progress, of the improvement of agricultural 

 methods. If a man could continually raise twenty, thirty 

 or forty bushels of wheat to the acre, or I will say thirty 

 bushels per acre, year after year, without any thought or 

 care except to plough the ground, sow the seed and gather 

 the crop, then there would be no occasion for study. Most 

 men are so constituted that they are willing to do as little 

 as they can, and still succeed in their business. If we can 

 get good food, good clothes, and comfortable quarters, with 

 little effort, we are apt to accept the conditions and not seek 

 for harder work with less compensation ; yet, while this is 

 true, no one believes that manhood, self-reliance and the 

 mental faculties can be best developed where there are no 

 obstacles to overcome. The inhabitant of the tropics gets 

 what clothing he wants and his daily food for a very small 

 expenditure of energy, while the New Englander struggles 

 with a hard soil, a severe climate, and sharp competition ; 

 and it is true the world over, that just in proportion as the 

 soil becomes exhausted, just in the same proportion does 

 the mind of the agricultural population become enriched. 

 An exhausted soil is the ideal condition for the development 

 of agricultural research and agricultural investigation. It 

 is during this second period, the period of exhaustion, as I 

 have chosen to term it, that we find the beginning of advance- 

 ment in agriculture. Liebig's work and Daw's work in 

 agricultural chemistry, the beginnings of our knowledge of 

 chemistry as applied to agriculture in England and in Ger- 

 many, belong to that period. Scientific men turned their 

 attention to the matter of plant growth and plant food, 

 simply because they wanted to find out the reason why soil 

 that had been continually cropped did not produce as large 

 crops as formerly. 



I have taken up more time with this part of my subject 

 than I intended, and I pass to the third period, the period of 

 renovation, or the period of restoring fertility to the soil. 

 Here is where we find better methods of agriculture. Here 

 is where we find new substances introduced to furnish food 



