ENGLISH AGRICULTURE. 19 



constituting themselves teachers of animal physiology. I 

 endeavoured in my first chapter to impress upon you that 

 agriculture is not a patchwork of all the natural sciences, but 

 that it is in itself a great subject upon which the various 

 natural sciences shed their rays of light. 



The proper function of the agricultural teacher is to 

 thoroughly explain agriculture upon the broad lines which 

 I have laid down ; at the same time to be so alive to the 

 bearings of science, or rather the various branches of 

 science, that he can show to his students the points of 

 contact ; that he can point out to them the vast importance 

 of a knowledge of chemistry, botany, and animal physiology ; 

 and thereby impress upon them that they are engaged 

 in the study of a truly great subject. If he can do 

 this, if he can make himself the master of agriculture as a 

 subject, and use the natural and abstract sciences as explana- 

 tory of his agricultural teaching, he will be more truly useful 

 in communicating knowledge than by entering upon the 

 explanation of the peculiarities of the digestive system, or 

 the changes which take place in the ripening of crops or the 

 elaboration of plant tissues. 



I shall endeavour in the following short treatise to at least 

 open this great subject, endeavouring to steer clear between 

 too great attention to any one point, and what might be called 

 unbecoming brevity. 



As already mentioned, the subject of agriculture, in the 

 first place, requires a knowledge of the soil. With reference 

 to this part of our subject, we must for a moment consider 

 what soil is. In order to do so, we must imagine the face 

 of the earth entirely divested of animal and of vegetable 

 life, and we would then have revealed to view the bare 

 ground from which all animal and also all vegetable life has 

 sprung. It was an old myth of the Greeks that Aphrodite 

 sprang from the foam of the ocean. However fanciful such 



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