24 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



EDUCATION IN AGRICULTURE. 



An Address before the Middlesex South Agricultural Society. 



BY THOMAS HILL. 



The art of the farmer is in many respects among the highest 

 and most difficult of human attainment. It shares with medi- 

 cine, education and government the peculiar honor of dealing 

 with organic nature, and even with moral nature, as its mate- 

 rial. The mechanic arts of every description are conversant 

 only with the mechanical or material properties of things, and 

 when they employ vegetable or animal products they deal with 

 them simply as mechanical or chemical agents ; so that these 

 arts require for their explanation and development only a 

 knowledge of the lower branches of the hierarchy of sciences. 

 Not so with the art of healing, in which it is essential for the 

 physician to understand the human frame in its physiological 

 as well as anatomical functions. Not so with education and 

 government, which seem to have only the most remote con- 

 nection with these lower subjects. And not so with agricul- 

 ture ; for the farmer, although requiring machines with which 

 to till the soil and harvest the crop, and obliged to conform to 

 the chemical laws in his manures, is principally concerned to 

 understand the relation of the living plant and animal to the 

 conditions under which they are placed ; and this leads him 

 into the spheres in which physiological, and, in respect to 

 animals, even psychological knowledge, is needed. That 

 knowledge may or may not be scientifically and methodically 

 arranged in the farmer's mind ; but the successful farmer must 

 have, in some form, a working knowledge of the highest 

 physical sciences and of the rudiments of the psychological. 



The relation of the practical arts to the sciences is close and 

 vital, but is often misapprehended. As in all other matters, 

 the errors lie in two opposite directions. Some men exagger- 



