6 MR. NICnOLS' ADDRESS. 



whose amazing skill exceeds all human capability. His laboratory 

 is no circumscribed one, bounded by partitions of wood and stone, 

 but its area extends farther than the eye can reach, and its enclos- 

 ing wall is the great rotunda, whose span stretches beyond even the 

 imagination of men. 



You, gentlemen, stand within this great rotunda, and in the im- 

 mediate presence of the great chemist, who calls upon you to aid 

 him in his work. Day by day you witness his marvelous power, in 

 calling from the slumbering earth the tender blade of grass, the 

 beautiful flower, the useful cereal and leguminous plants, the creep- 

 ing vine, and the spreading oak of the forest. 



You can promote or you can destroy, the work of the sublime 

 Creator and Architect. You can retard, or facilitate, the chemi- 

 cal changes which are going on so continuously and vigorously 

 around you and beneath your very feet. 



And what are these changes ? A knowledge of them teaches 

 the great secret of plant growth. It unfolds to us the philosophy 

 of that fact incomprehensible to so many, how from the ethcrial 

 atmosphere almost alone, the solid forms of organized structures 

 are elaborated. 



How wonderful is this truth, gentlemen, that a large proportion 

 of the material of the grains, and fruits, and grasses, you have 

 just gathered into your barns and granaries, are composed of the 

 constituents of common air. Perhaps it is even more wonderful, 

 that the solid and inflexible fibres of the oak, the hickory, the 

 beech, and scores of other woods, exceeding even these in density 

 and hardness, are formed from the unstable medium we breathe, 

 and which seems so utterly devoid of materiality and solidity. 



Chemistry alone is capable of teaching the farmer the philosophy 

 of that aggregation of atoms, by which plant organisms are devel- 

 oped and increased, until full maturity is attained. It teaches him 

 respecting the office, the soil, the rain, the air, subserves in accom- 

 phshing the work, and the information it imparts is minute, wonder- 

 fully exact, and intensely interesting to the student. It teaches 

 him the interesting fact, that his soil originates from the solid rock 

 which constitutes the crust of the earth, and explains the nature of 

 the forces which have produced crumbling and decay in the same. 

 Its teachings are so important in this particular, that I will stop a 

 moment to consider them. 



