CHEMISTRY. 343 



necessary to the farmer as to the soldier. But the oflicer, naval or military, not 

 only gets his four years' instruction, at the expense of the landed interest in the 

 proportion that that interest is the most numerous and contributes most to all 

 Government expenses, but he is paid besides, and finally insured to receive a 

 commission and good pay for life. Now we are not finding any fault with this, 

 but what we marvel at is that the landed interest, that class of the community 

 on which the burden of Government chiefly falls, should require no appropria- 

 tion, no assistance, no provision for instruction, also, out of the public funds, for 

 their own sons, in their own profession. We don't say provision for board, and 

 clothes, and pay, and life commissions, and hospitals, and pensions, with the 

 run of the Army and Navy for their sons, but an appropriation simply for 

 instruction. 



We have barely hinted at the sort of instruction received at the Government 

 schools, by the privileged classes. Now let us see how, in what branches, the 

 rising generation destined to be cultivators of the soil are instructed. Take one 

 of these, and, for example, instead of asking him what is gunpowder, ask an 

 elementary question appropriate to his destined pursuit. Ask what is soil ? and 

 ten to one but he answers, soil is earth, and earth is soil ! Yet, if taught in the 

 matter and manner that every farmer's son should be taught, by men properly 

 prepared, and qualified, and paid, as Professors are qualified at our military 

 schools, he would not be fourteen years old before he would answer that soil is 

 the primitive earth in a state of mixture with organized matter fit for the growth 

 of plants ; that the surface of the earth, in every country on which plants have 

 grown and decayed, is properly denominated soil ; while the earth at a foot or 

 more beneath the surface, commonly called subsoil, is comparatively without or- 

 ganized matter, and is therefore properly denominated earth, clay, sand, gravel, 

 lime, rocks, or stones, as tlie case may be. 



If agriculturists were alive to their own interests and rights, animated by a 

 proper sense of self-respect, and conscious of their power, as other classes are — 

 enjoying, as they do, the means of complete control over that greatest of all 

 earthly concerns, the education of the youth of a country — they would see that 

 public instruction in the art and principles of tillage and husbandry was at least 

 as thorough and complete, and as much out of the public treasure, as in any other 

 art or profession. In that case, no boy, designed to be a farmer, would leave his 

 school, and enter upon his trade, without having learned, for example, the num- 

 ber of elements which are found existing in plants and animals. Of these he 

 would know how many are supplied by the atmosphere and by water (as carbon, 

 hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen), and that these are they which constitute by far 

 the greatest proportion of every organic substance. He would be taught what 

 these gases are, and what uses Nature designed them to perform ; and again, he 

 would learn, at school, that the remaining twelve elements, though usually pres- 

 ent in much smaller quantity, are no less essential to the Avell-being of the plant, 

 and must be obiained/ro?« the soil on which the plant grows. To yield all these 

 other elements, he would of course learn that the soil must be of a complex na- 

 ture. If it do not naturally contain them, or if it contain them in not sufficient 

 quantity or proportion, he would learn, before he entered on his profession', that 

 they must be supplied by the farmer, or he must be content to have little or no 

 return for his labor. He need not be, nor should any country school-boy reach, 

 14 years of age, before he should have been taught that each crop, removing from 

 riie soil certain quantities of these elements, making a part of and indispensable 



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