AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. 393 



AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. 



PROGRESS OP PUBLIC OPINION INDICATIONS OF A FAVORABLE CHANUE. 



National habits of thinking and acting on the great topics of public education 

 and morals, are not to be expected to undergo those marked and visible muta- 

 tions which are seen to take place, in a single season, in the taste and costumes 

 of the luxurious and fashionable world. On the contrary, great chanrjcs in social 

 institutions, and in courses of instruction and of industry, especially among agri- 

 cultural communities, are necessarily the work of time, and to be finally accom- 

 plished with ditlicully, and then only by the enlightened and imperfectly concert- 

 ed labors of public spirited benefactors, too few and far between to rival in ener- 

 gy the more active and systematized exertions for improvement by merchants 

 and manufacturers. Yet all anxious observers must perceive that a salutary 

 change is now in progress for the benefit of American Agriculture — one whictk 

 guaranties not only greater fruitfulness for the capital and labor embarked in it, 

 but, what is yet more gratifying, higher rank and honor to those who resort to 

 it as the means of support for themselves and their families. 



The change to which we refer, and in view of which all enlightened friends 

 of the cause may felicitate each other, consists in an evidently increasing dispo- 

 sition to investigate the principles which affect the results of practical Agricul- 

 ture ; and without a knowledge of which it can never attain either that dignity 

 or success which God hath kindly ordained should only be won by the triumphs 

 of mind over matter — of light over darkness. The American public is beginning 

 to see that between the rude physical labor of the boor, who aspires only to know 

 when and how to plant and to reap, as his father did before him — and the calcu- 

 lating forecast of the educated farmer, who has been taught to know exactly 

 what each crop will demand and take away from the soil, and hence what it 

 will require to be restored to it — there is as wide a gap to be filled up as has 

 been llled up in the progress of medical science, by which the well-weighed 

 remedies and skillful appliances of the accomplished physician and surgeon have 

 banished the vile nostrums of the conjurer and the quack. Yes, truly, and for 

 its honor be it said, that it is getting now to be understood that as wide a space 

 is to be overcome in the art of cultivation, by a more thorough knowledge of the 

 principles of tillage and of vegetable physiology, as has been passed in the art 

 of ship-building and the science of navigation, as indicated by a comparison of 

 the Indian's bark-canoe with the steam-frigate, plowing the " deep waters of the 

 dark blue sea," with the precision of the sun itself as it marks its course on the 

 dial-plate. 



A great stumbling-block, however, in the way of science coming to speed the 

 plow, is that want of ambition — that absence of all thirst for distinction — which 

 is at once the parent and the offspring of ignorance ; that lethargic self-content- 

 edness, which creates the very difficulties it imagines to exist in the road to far- 

 ther advancement. How common to hear even otherwise sensible men observe, 

 " Oh ! what can books teach us ? What more have we to learn ? With plenty 

 of manure, and sufficient force, and good plows to work with, J can make as 

 good crops as any of your book farmers I " — forgetting, or rather never having 



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