32 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



practice which has brought them to this conclusion, I will not 

 undertake to say. I find the enterprising and intelligent leaders 

 of agriculture in England and America, those men who believe 

 in developing the resources of these two countries by the 

 diffusion of useful knowledge in matters of farming, ever ready 

 to record and consider the experiments of practical men in their "^ 

 fields and stalls. Throughout the most useful agricultural 

 literature of these two countries, I find diffused the results of 

 experiments in every conceivable branch of husbandry. If I 

 would know the comparative value of the various modes of 

 preparing food for cattle, the effects of various combinations of 

 food, tested by careful weight and measure, I have but to turn 

 to the statements drawn up and recorded by those who knew 

 how to select animals for feeding, and who, having written down 

 the results of their observations, offered them to some agricul- 

 tural society either at home or abroad for publication. If I am 

 at a loss to know what mode of cultivation, and what crop are 

 peculiarly adapted to any given piece of land, I need not search 

 in vain through the transactions of agricultural societies. It . 

 may be difficult to establish by mathematical, tables the precise 

 cost of any crop throughout any large territory, because nature 

 has her own mode of working in every locality, on hillside and 

 in valley, on northern and on southern slopes, on the seaside 

 and on inland plains — but I can lay aside my arithmetic and 

 having learned the precise spot on earth where my labor is to 

 be applied, I may get my lesson of those whose agricultural lot 

 in life is analogous to my own. Shall we then reject the tran- 

 sactions of the Royal Agricultural Society, the various treatises 

 on practical agriculture, all the record of the founders of breeds 

 of cattle, the reports of local societies in this country, the com- 

 pilations and essays of secretaries of the various boards of agri- 

 culture among us, simply because they have not received the 

 sanction of a professor in some experimental agricultural college, 

 or because the officers of such an institution have no faith in 

 the information which an observing and successful farmer 

 acquires as he goes on with his work ? That system of educa- 

 tion which is based upon the assumption that all beyond its 

 limits is profound ignorance, can hardly succeed in guiding the 

 mind of man aright. And the president of an agricultural 

 college who shuts his eyes against all the practical information 



