14 MR. gray's address. 



tory or professional knowledge. What should we think 

 of the wisdom or the sense of that community which 

 should encourage all its physicians, lawyers, ministers, 

 merchants and politicians to engage in their respective 

 professions without any professional knowledge what- 

 ever ? And yet there is as much propriety for a young 

 man to engage in the profession of law, medicine, or 

 theology, without professional knowledge, as in that of 

 forming without a knowledge of its fundamental princi- 

 ples. True, he might do more injury to society in the 

 former case, but he would have an equal title to the char- 

 acter of a quack in both; anl quackery in farming has 

 many striking analogies to quackery in medicine, and 

 were it not so common would meet with similar ridicule 

 and rsbuke by all intelligent men. 



But how can this recipient poiver be supplied, and how- 

 can this professional knowledge be acquired, unless agri- 

 culture be made a subject of study '? As our common 

 school system excludes those kindred branches of natu- 

 ral science which are necessary to a professional knowl- 

 edge of agriculture, the commencement of improvement 

 must be made in our academies^ and higher seminaries. 

 Our colleges have a different object, their course of study 

 has become too rigidly fixed to be altered, and it is 

 doubtful whether any success could crown the effort if 

 tried. But this is not the case with our academies, and 

 scientific agriculture may be introduced into some of 

 them and taught successfully to those who are to be the 

 future cultivators of the soil. With an institution liber- 

 ally endowed, with proper aids, text books, lectures, 

 apparatus, and experiments conducted in the field, the 

 young farmer, after having received a thorough discipline 



* After the subject has been introduced into a few of our higher seminaries, 

 for the purpose of preparing the teachers of our common schools to instruct in 

 the various departments of Natural History, the subject may then be introduced 

 into them ; but until we have teachers qualified for such instructions, we must 

 confine our eflForts to higher seminaries, where those facilities may be furnished 

 which are required for teaching the first principles of Chemistry and Natural 

 History. The great difficulty now is that we have neither qualified teachers, 

 nor books, nor cabinets, nor apparatus, which are requisite to prepare men in 

 our common schools for the theoretical and practical parts of agriculture and 

 the various other arts and trades. 



