Serious defects in Agriculture and Navigation. 77 



without loud complaints, indignant remonstrances, 

 fatal oversights, sad mis-calculations, terrible short- 

 comings, social or material evils to be remedied if 

 possible, whole masses of people, indeed whole classes 

 to be succoured and lifted out of the slough, and 

 enormous difficulties placed by nature in our way 

 evidently that we may exercise our wit and our virtues 

 in the attempt to overcome them. Here, from all 

 these Isles, there arises a despairing cry from agri- 

 culture, as if it had really reached the end of its tether, 

 and had found itself landed in utter helplessness and 

 insolvency a bad speculation altogether. Here are 

 countless problems, and at the same time countless 

 discoveries, which if they lead to nothing else, prove 

 the inexhaustible nature of our dominion over the 

 elements. Then, for the sea, with its terrible average 

 of wreck and total loss running on without intermission 

 and with but rare abatement, who shall say there is 

 here no work for the discoverer and inventor who will 

 give his heart and soul and mind to it ? " 



It is indeed high time, that by means of discoveries 

 which will enable us to predict with certainty the 

 nature of coming seasons, we shall be better enabled 

 to cope with adversities in agriculture ; also, that the 

 numerous wrecks, and the thousands of lives lost with 

 them every year on our coasts, should be diminished. 

 But these desirable results cannot be effected by in- 

 vention based upon insufficient knowledge ; invention 

 must be preceded by general as well as special re- 

 search, because the former often discloses important 



