172 SELECTIONS FROM ADDRESSES. 



could be provided for particular crops and soils, adapted to the 

 composition of both. When chemistry shall have succeeded, 

 as I trust will be done, in compounding such manures, and they 

 shall be offered for sale, we may anticipate a rapid advance in 

 practical agriculture. 



Though I have doubtless wearied your patience, gentlemen 

 of the Society, by these details. I would gladly add more. But 

 I trust I have said enough to show how important a bearing 

 science has upon practical agriculture. The day I trust has 

 gone by, certainly among the enlightened farmers of this great 

 valley, when men reject and treat contemptuously what has 

 been called book farming ; by which I understand farming on 

 scientific principles. Such farming has done too much, both in 

 Europe and this country, to be any longer despised, or even 

 looked upon with scepticism. The many agricultural societies, 

 on both sides of the Atlantic, so prolific of good, are based upon 

 science ; and would be almost useless without it : and the nu- 

 merous journals of agriculture now published, derive their chief 

 and most valuable matter from the applications of science to 

 cultivation. Indeed, it is scientific agriculture that enables 

 twenty millions of people to subsist in Great Britain on the 

 same soil, which in 1780 sustained only nine millions. The 

 Highland Agricultural Society, in Scotland, especially, has 

 done wonders, when we consider that no country is more bleak 

 and barren in Europe; yet it now has reached a very high 

 state of agricultural prosperity, and chiefly through the influ- 

 ence of that Society, now sixty-six years old. The average 

 produce of wheat in the whole of Great Britain was formerly 

 but nine bushels to the acre ; but it is now more than 19 bush- 

 els; and in several counties of England and Scotland, the aver- 

 age is not less than 50 bushels. Says a late traveller, "a far- 

 mer by the name of Thomas Oliver, residing five or six miles 

 from Edinburgh, leased a farm for the last twenty years of 150 

 acres, paying annually a rent of ten guineas per acre, or fifty 

 dollars ; on which he raised grain, hay, and vegetables for the 

 market of Edinburgh. This lease he has recently renewed for 

 twenty -nine years on the same terms, and from a poor man has 

 become independent in his circumstances, and now rides in his 



