AMERICAN AGRICULTURE. 25 



consider only what individuals ought to ilo. The question of 

 what government ought to do, will be examined at another time.* 

 I. The farmer must acquaint himself with the principles of his 

 art. Jts foundation is laid in knowledge, and its successful prac- 

 tice depends upon individual skill. Of late years the sciences have 

 laid open vast resources for the farmer. Geology, Botany, and 

 especially Chemistry, have already taken rapid steps towards revo- 

 lutionizing the practice of agriculture. It no longer answers for 

 a man to quote his father as the best authority. We must go 

 higher now and follow the laws of J^'ature. Let us not be un- 

 derstood to mean that every farmer must become a chemist in the 

 strict sense of the term, although to a certain degree he must be 

 one. He is a practical chemist already, and he should be in a 

 measure a theoretical one ; that is, he should be a reasoning man, 

 in respect to the operations he carries on. He should be able to 

 see the cause when a certain effect is produced, and to understand 

 why the various processes which he follows are necessary, and what 

 are wrong and what are right. This does not involve necessarily 

 an acquaintance with all the technical terms of science, terms now 

 so much the dread of the uneducated farmer. But he should un- 

 derstand the names of things he uses, and not ask the chemist who 

 labors for his benefit, to perform the impossibility of finding 

 names for substances which a man can comprehend without find- 

 ing them out. Nothing is more common than this complaint, and 

 nothing more wrong. A great beauty and excellence in the 

 names applied by modern chemistry is, that for the most part, the 

 name of the substance defines and explains its composition, so 

 that by seeing the name of a compound we know of what it con- 

 sists. Take an example — the acid commonly called " oil of vit- 

 riol." This is an unmeaning term, and conveys no idea of that 

 substance any more than if it were written in the Chinese tongue. 

 But the name " sulphuric dcid," which is the proper one, indicates 

 at once that sulphur is the essential ingredient, and a slight know- 

 ledge of chemistry tells us that oxygen is the other. The farmer 

 is familiar with " plaster of Paris ;" does he know such a sub- 

 stance as " sulphate of lime ;" a name which at least shows the 

 presence of sulphur and lime ! On the contrary, fault is often 



* An able article on this subject will be found on another page.— Eds. 

 VOL. I. — NO. 1. D 



