farmers' miscellany. 103 



also wide awake to the benefits derived from these social meetings, 

 and that in many of them they are the active members. And they 

 not only talk of mere practical matters, but unlike our farmers, 

 they are not startled at the technical words and terms, but grapple 

 with the hard names of chemistry, like men of science, so that it 

 is sometimes highly amusing to witness their familiarity with these 

 matters, though they never saw the inside of a laboratory in their 

 life. But they have learned by hearing others, and they talk un- 

 derstandingly. We know that farmers in this country, that boasts 

 of its general knowledge and education, are apt to richcule such 

 notions and complain that men who write for their benefit will not 

 find some other words for the names of things they write about, that 

 they can understand, as if oxygen or hydrogen would be any more 

 comprehensible with another name. 



But if they will meet together and make themselves familiar 

 with these things, they will cease their complaints. In their 

 meetings they can talk over those matters in which they are all 

 interested, and we venture to say there is no neighborhood in 

 which some one will not be found who can explain all hard words. 



We have among our own best friends, some farmers, who can 

 talk like a book, as the saying goes, and communicate facts of vast 

 importance and interest, and who, if they would form such 

 associations amongst their neighbors, would aid not a little in stir- 

 ring them up to improvement. Ideas which one man may think 

 of little consequence, because he has known them all his life, may 

 be entirely new and of great benefit to others. And there is no 

 man who has not something in his head that will be new to some- 

 body. The march of the world is forward now, and there is no 

 class of men who have suffered so much undeserved neglect as the 

 tillers of the soil. They need, as a mass, a strong lift to bring 

 them up. And we rejoice at every aid that is held out to them.\ 

 Let them be induced to form clubs — meet together sociably, and 

 talk over what they have done and are doing, and what more can 

 be done by them — learn what peculiarities of tillage each one may 

 have, and if they are not able at first to talk very learnedly, we 

 venture to say that the sense of their ignorance thus brought home 

 to them, will stimulate them to seek for information where it can 

 be found. It will open the way for knowledge to creep in, and 

 they will be better prepared to become scientific men. 



