6 MR. gray's address. 



evident to all, that Agriculture has not kept pace with 

 most other arts. It has not derived that aid from sci- 

 entific discovery and mechanical invention which has 

 been secured in almost every other department of human 

 industry. Why is agriculture, the oldest as well as the , 

 foundation of all other arts, so slow in its progress ? 

 Why must each generation of farmers go through the 

 same experiments, without being able to profit by those 

 of their predecessors, or to make but slow advances upon 

 what their fathers have done before them? In other 

 words, why has not agriculture as an art, advanced as 

 rapidly as other arts? And why have not the efforts to 

 improve and perfect it, been as successful as those 

 which have been directed to the same end, in other 

 departments of human industry? Is not the true answer 

 to these inquiries to be found in the fact that those means 

 which have been deemed indispensable in other arts have 

 not been resorted to, to the same extent, in this? We 

 have employed means which never have produced and 

 never can produce the results at which we aim. They 

 do not strike deep enough to furnish a permanent basis 

 upon which the art may be built up and cemented to- 

 gether in one complete and symmetrical whole. 



I remark then, in the first place, that in order to se- 

 cure constant progress and permanent improvement in Ag- 

 riculture^ it must be based 07i scientific principles. Agri- 

 culture must be cultivated not only as an art, but as a 

 science. I need not stop here to show that with a few 

 honorable exceptions, the art is practised merely as an 

 art. That the great majority of farmers are unable to 

 give an intelligible reason for the modes of culture 

 which they adopt. For the fact is notorious, that they 

 are not only ignorant of the changes which take place 

 in the process of vegetation and of those conditions 

 which are requisite for the highest development of the 

 vital power in the proJuction of their crops, but that 

 many of them do not know the nature of a single ingre- 

 dient of their soil. In fact, the idea of "Book Farming" 

 has been in many places a subject of ridicule. As if 

 the recorded experiments and generalizations of scien- 



