8 



Wilson Flag'g, whose books should be among- the choice read- 

 ing of every intelligent New Englander, has embodied in his 

 sketches of the Woods and By-ways of Massachusetts, the most 

 tender and delicate love for the beauty of our familiar country- 

 side. But he takes issue with scientific farming as that agricul- 

 ture organized for gain alone which drives the muses from every 

 haunt and gives a prosaic and uninspiring character to life. He 

 shudders at the prospect of the day when the farm shall be only 

 as the cotton-mill, spiritless, busy, cold. But it is not scientific 

 farming after all, which he denounces as destroying every way- 

 side covert for the smaller birds, grubbing up every forest on the 

 slopes of the hills, and setting mechanical fingers only at work 

 in the rural industries of the land. For perhaps the highest 

 sweep of agricultural science will be in detecting and explaining 

 the balance of the forces among which the farmer works — the 

 wild spontaneous lives of nature and the other lives over which 

 human effort broods. Science, like Providence, will note a spar- 

 row's fall, and will judge the value of a tree for other things than 

 timber or fuel. Where half-science sees but one method of ac- 

 tion and unsettles and disturbs, a later and fuller knowledge will 

 set itself the task to readjust the harmonies which have been 

 broken in its own name. 



I shall ask your attention to several specific illustrations of my 

 leading thought thus outlined. To begin at a point not often 

 touched, it must be in the power of Science to render substantial 

 benefit to Agriculture because Agriculture enters nature as in 

 some sense a disturbing force. The cultivation of a country is 

 the destruction of its old balance of conditions, the harmony es- 

 tablished, it may be, by uncounted centuries. 



When our forefathers first sailed into sight of these familiar 

 shores, Nahant was a wooded promontory ; and the Salem hills, 

 which are so bleak and bare to-day, were rounded with the deep 

 verdure of their ancient trees. Where dry pasture is, the damp 



