HINDRANCES AND HELPS 



to analyze his soil — but his crops dc not com- 

 pare with those of his rude neighbor, who 

 sneers at chemistry and fine farming. Of 

 course I do not mean to join him in his sneers ; 

 I only mean to illustrate how a large sagacity, 

 guided by its own instincts, has very much to 

 do with good farming; and in a way not 

 clearly explicable — certainly not explicable by 

 its possessor. 



Just so, you will sometimes find, far back in 

 the country, a shrewd old physician, utterly 

 unread in the new books, who laughs at the 

 Gazette des Hdpitaux and the Chirurgical, and 

 yet who has that rare insight which enables 

 him to detect and wrestle with disease strangely 

 well. His long observation, his comparison 

 of trifles, his estimate of the moral forces at 

 work are so just and discriminating, that he 

 brings a tremendous power of judgment to the 

 case. Put him in a room for consultation, and 

 his gray eye tweaks, his lips work nervously; 

 he canijot enter into the learned discourse of 

 the younger men of the profession; he is dazed 

 by it all — wishing he were learned, if learning 

 helps ; but when appeal is made to him, there is 

 such clear, sagacious, homely cut-down into 

 the very marrow of the difficulty, as absolutely 

 confounds the young doctors ; all this, not be- 



297 



