580 SELECTIONS FROM ADDRESSES. 



CHEMISTRY IN ITS RELATIONS TO AGRICUL- 

 TURE. 



[Edrads from an Address, Delivered at Concord, Mass., htfore the Middlesex 

 Agricultural Sociely, at Us last Exhibition, by Hon. L. V. Bell.] 



Upon the first development of the new science of chemistry, 

 the agricultural world instinctively looked to it, as the bearer 

 of good tidings to its art. It so let the world into the hidden 

 mysteries of things in the arts, that there was a natural expec- 

 tation that it M^as to serve in elucidating the arcana of vegetable 

 growth. In glass manufacture, calico printing, color making, 

 metallurgy, and a hundred other of the like mysteries, as the 

 arts were termed in the indentures of those who were to serve 

 a seven years' apprenticeship in their acquisition, prior to a 

 true chemistry, the difficult processes having been reached 

 tentatively or accidentally, were kept as rich seci»ets, and the 

 recipes were handed down as legacies and heir looms from 

 father to son. Chemical analysis at once unfolded all these 

 hidden results. A color, the making of which, was known to 

 perhaps one or two families, who kept it in sacred security 

 from their very employers, was discovered by analyzing a rag 

 or a sample of the fabric upon v»'hich it had been impressed. 

 A drug which existed in nature ojily in rare and inaccessible 

 deposits, was compounded by mixing together two or three 

 cheap and common ingredients. And at this hour, in every 

 manufacturing country, a chemist is an essential of every great 

 work, and nothing is bought, except after his determination of 

 the exact value of the article used. One man in our capital 

 city, after a long residence in the country where the article is 

 made, of close observation, great experience and consummate 

 tact, can, by breaking and scratching and examining a sample 

 of indigo, determine its quality of coloring principle so exactly, 

 that no failure need be feared in acting from his judgment to 

 an extent involving thousands of dollars. Any competent 

 operative chemist can do this same thing by the processes of 

 his laboratory, to the same degree of precision and reliability ; 



