394 MONTHLY JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURE. 



learned, all the time, that a kind of manure comparatively without effect when 

 applied to one crop, or kind of soil, may be powerful when applied to another ; 

 and that certain soils, if he were educated to know their nature, would be found 

 to contain the constituents of one plant, while they may be quite deficient in what 

 is necessary to the growth of another. Such men, who in their ignorance and 

 self-conceit already know everything, forget how much the labor they employ 

 has already been economized by the inventions of ingenious, thinking minds, ap- 

 plied to the structure of the plow itself; and that, long since, your anti-book- 

 knowledge men, like themselves, believed that the plow had already reached 

 the last stage of amendment of which it was thought to be susceptible. How 

 different with the intellectual man — the man of progress — he who believes that 

 the Almighty endowed us with reasoning faculties above all animals, that they 

 might be kept in constant exercise for the melioration of our condition in all 

 things ! Such men, looking back on the field over which we have passed — ad- 

 vancing, even during the last half-century, from one labor-saving invention to 

 another ; from a less to a much more thorough knowledge of the nature of ma- 

 nures ; noting the improvements in the form and economy of our domestic ani- 

 mals, until the art of breeding has been reduced to a science : marking the in- 

 troduction of new and valuable fruits and vegetables — such men, thus blessed 

 with hopeful and inquisitive minds, are readily persuaded that the end is not yet, 

 in the progressive advancement of Agriculture, any more than in the arts of man- 

 ufacture, in the application of steam, or in the discoveries to be made by astron- 

 omy or navigation. Such men see no good reason why steam itself should not 

 yet be made far more contributory to the purposes of the farmer, in some propor- 

 tion to what it has been forced to do for the civilizing operations of commerce, 

 and the barbarous purposes of war. Thus enlightened and animated by a retro- 

 spect of what has been done, to hop,eful exertion for the honor and benefit of their 

 own pursuit, the intellectual cultivator and friend of American husbandry is seen 

 to realize much of that which at first he only hoped might, in process of time, 

 prove to be possible ; and thus it is that Agriculture is destined to undergo still 

 greater ameliorations, of which the ignorant, the slothful and the desponding 

 have yet no conception — ameliorations that proceed by geometrical ratios ; for iu 

 this, as in other sciences, every advance that is made shall add to the hight and 

 the strength of the scaffolding employed in making additional improvements. 



So marked and extraordinary have been the strides made in the application 

 of the sciences to the art of cultivation lately in Scotland, that Professor Johnston 

 has predicted that, within the next five years, prescriptions for particular manures 

 having reference to the next succeeding crop in a given rotation, would be made 

 out as systematically, and with as much confidence in the results of their appli- 

 cation, as are the medical prescriptions of the physician to the apothecary. Nor 

 IS this evidence of the progress of agricultural science in that country to be won- 

 dered at, when we read, as in the last Edinburgh Review, that the writer, des- 

 canting on the increased productiveness of the lands in England and Scotland, by 

 which these countries have been enabled, until now, to meet the demands of a 

 steadily increasing population, remarks that on stepping into a country school on 

 the wayside, in Scotland, he witnessed an examination of a class of " poor bare- 

 footed boys" of 14 years of age, who were going creditably through a close cate» 

 chisra in Agricultural Chemistry. 



But we have been insensibly drawn off from the sole design of presenting a 

 few of the signs of a general change in favor of special education for the plow, 

 (es6) 



