SIGNAL FOR NEW METHODS. 245 



only for the amount of rent due from them." This picture of 

 misery and suffering wliich prevailed in Britain will give a tol- 

 erably fair idea of the state of things in Europe generally at the 

 same time. 



It is not surprising that the great statesman and philosopher 

 should have destroyed all the agricultural literature of such a 

 period which came within his reach. The facts which those 

 books furnished offered no encouragement to his mind in the 

 great work in which he was engaged for the benefit of mankind. 

 Isolated instances of successful cultivation, without definite 

 description of the soil, season, locality and chemical laws 

 involved, were no more to him than so many parcels of the crop 

 grown. Around the greatest and most universal of all forms of 

 human industry had been gathered, for his mental gratification, 

 nothing but crude traditions, absurd prejudices and a confused 

 mass of incidents. The laws of breeding were unheard of. 

 The production of animals for specific purposes was unknown. 

 No analysis of soils had ever been attempted. Even a gratify- 

 ing result, either of cattle husbandry or of tillage, could not be 

 submitted to physiology for investigation and law, nor to chem- 

 istry for rule ; for neither physiology nor chemistry had advanced 

 far beyond anatomy and alchemy. In this ill-digested record 

 known as agricultural literature could be found nothing upon 

 which to establish a system of agricultural education ; nothing 

 which would rouse the popular mind to action, whenever social 

 and civil burdens should be removed from the masses of men ; 

 nothing which would enable an enterprising and public-spirited 

 land-holder to develop to its fullest extent the resources which 

 lay hidden beneath his half cultivated acres. 



When Lord Bacon set his seal of disapprobation upon the 

 agricultural record and investigation which had preceded his 

 time, he gave a signal for new methods in this, as he did in so 

 many other departments of science and art. And the special 

 privilege which we enjoy, over him and his agricultural friends, 

 is a system of inquiry and of analysis wliich has already gone 

 far towards giving us definite laws to guide us in our pursuit. 

 In Massachusetts how steadily has this work been going on. 

 Fifty years ago it commenced in tlie simple form of the agricul- 

 tural society, founded for the purpose of accumulating facts and 

 for mutual stimulus among the members, enlisting in its service 



