HINDRANCES AND HELPS 



AGRICULTURAL CHEMISTRY 



When a man buys clean copies of Liebig and 

 of Boussingault, and walks into possession of 

 his land with the books under his arm, and an 

 assured conviction that with their aid, he is 

 about to supplant altogether the old practice, 

 and commit havoc with old theories, and raise 

 stupendous crops, and drive all his old-fash- 

 ioned neighbors to the wall, — he is laboring 

 under a mistake. His calves will very 

 likely take the "scours" ; the cut-worms 

 will slice off his phosphated corn; the 

 Irish maid will pound his cream into a frothy 

 chowder; — in which events he will probably 

 lose his temper; or, if a cool man, will retire 

 under a tree, and read a fresh chapter out of 

 Liebig. 



There are a great many contingencies about 

 farming, which chemistry does not cover, and 

 probably never will. People talk of agricul- 

 tural chemistry as if it were a special chemistry 

 for the farmer's advantage. The truth is (and 

 it was well set forth, I remember, in a lecture 

 of Professor Johnson's), there is no such thing 

 as agricultural chemistry; and the term is not 

 only a misnomer, but misleads egregiously. 



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