26 TRANSACTIONS. 



the Church, and the Homestead. Let me take these four 

 structures as the visible symbols of four great classes of 

 his relations to the world, which I wish to bring under 

 your survey ; and thus they shall fix the method and the 

 limits of my address. AVithout threatening you either 

 with a scientific dissertation, or a political treatise, or a 

 sermon of theology, or a domestic lecture, I wish to repre- 

 sent, if I can, under these convenient types, something of 

 the dignity of your freehold, as farmers, in our modern, 

 American heritage of free thought, free industry, free 

 worship, and free affections. 



I. As towards the School-house just as it stands, with 

 its various equipments for the intellectual discipline and 

 furnishing of youth, I take it for granted every Massachu- 

 setts farmer will follow the most careful and most generous 

 treatment. He will be its eager and unflagging patron. 

 He will rob his own children of no portion of their right- 

 ful bounty in its sphere of noble study, by calling them off 

 to help out the meagre force of labor at home, thus starving 

 their brains while he fattens his mutton ; inverting nature, 

 by growing lordly sheep and sheepish boys. He will 

 grudge no taxation that provides the best teacher that the 

 most thorough committee can hire. He will see to it, that 

 in its architecture, its order, its surrounding beauty, and 

 all its apparatus and appointments of instruction, this 

 little Smithsonian Institute of his district represents the 

 best genius of the neighborhood, and reflects the educa- 

 tional wisdom of the day. 



But beyond this ordinary fealty to good learning, I take 

 the School-house as signifying also that whole contribution 

 of science to agriculture, which is now one of the acknowl- 

 edged and prime requisites of your vocation. And here 

 my subject opens into a somewhat wider scope. 



There is a rather irregular and unorganized, but on the 

 whole progressive, body of information^ which is called, by 

 courtesy, the Science of Agriculture. It is gradually 

 taking the shape and proportions, under your intelligent 

 authors and periodicals, of other and exacter sciences. If 

 we seize this body of knowledge precisely in its present 



