4 MR. NICnOLS' ADDRESS. 



The suggestions of members of tliis Society have led me to call 

 your attention, at this time, to what Chemistry has taught, or is 

 capable of teaching, the husbandman. It is a subject which would 

 receive additional interest and value from experimental illustra- 

 tions, and I fully intended thus to illustrate it ; but the time and 

 place would seem to forbid it. I shall call in the aid of a few dia- 

 grams to explain some departments of my subject. 



I presume it is within the memory of most of us when a speaker 

 who should have announced his design of introducing Chemistry to 

 the attention of a gathering of agriculturists, would have been re- 

 garded as impertinent, and as much out of order as the politician, 

 who, in a religious meeting, arose and observed that if the breth- 

 ren would give their attention he would make a short speech upon 

 the tariff question. 



Thanks be to men of science. Chemistry is no longer ow^ of place 

 in associations like this, but is emphatically in place, and the intel- 

 ligent husbandman now turns to its teachings, as the mariner turns 

 to the polar star, to guide him in his midnight wanderings over un- 

 explored oceans and seas. In discoursing upon what Chemistry 

 has taught the husbandman, I shall presume that there are two 

 distinct classes of soil cultivators, one of which is thorouglily alive 

 to all the improvements and discoveries of the times. They are 

 reading, thinking, thrifty farmers, who have large barns well filled, 

 although the area of their cultivated land may be scarcely larger 

 than what would once have sufficed for a respectable potato patch. 

 They take good care of their manure, and perhaps are industrious 

 and enlightened enough to save the liquid excrement of their ani- 

 mals. They are the first to learn the merits or demerits of new 

 farming utensils, and to experiment with mowing machines, seed plan- 

 ters, potato diggers, &c. ; and when some contriving Yankee, in his 

 disgust at the puerility of the labor of the body of flesh and bone 

 which God has given us, brings out his steam man, with strong legs 

 and arms of wood and iron, they will be the first to set him to work 

 in their fields, while they will return to their parlors to consult 

 Liebig, Stockhardt, or Johnston, respecting the formation of a new 

 heap of compost. 



The other class do nofftelieve in Chemistry, or any other science 

 for farmers, neither do they believe in any improvement in agricul- 



