28 TRANSACTIONS. 



agricultural pursuits has been their great hindrance. I 

 mean the general independence they allow, as providing 

 in themselves the necessities of living. This supersedes 

 commerce, removes competition, and so tends to quench 

 enterprise. 



In affirming agricultural science to have passed through 

 its epoch of general discovery, however, I referred not so 

 much to the rude and slow advances it made for thousands 

 of years earlier, as to the more recent period when it took 

 a sudden start forward, and may be said to have first risen 

 into the dignity of an intellectual concern. These dis- 

 coveries moved in two directions, chemical and mechanical. 

 Chemistry applied analysis to the Avhole material of agri- 

 culture, plants and animals and all products, as well as 

 soils ; whereas the stupidity of ages had been taking it for 

 granted that, since all earth is earth, it matters nothing 

 what its elements are, so the seed be under ground. Mech- 

 anism stretched out its hand, and gave the husbandman 

 a new set of tools — a branch of the general turn for 

 mechanical invention and elaboration that has marked the 

 mental movement of the last hundred years. By both 

 these agencies, not only was a new principle introduced 

 into the action of agriculture, but at the same time accrued 

 an enlargement of its spirit and motive. 



Of course, at the first, chemistry did very little with her 

 crucible, and mechanism comparatively little with its smith- 

 eries and factories. Both have, probably, only begun 

 their magical economics yet. But it is none the less true, 

 that in the simple discovery of the fact^ that chemistry, 

 along Avith geology and physiology, has relations to farm- 

 ing, and could he made to help it, in the bare establishing 

 of that fact^ was a grander crisis in the history of this 

 business than is likely ever to come again. So in the 

 demonstrated feasibility of labor-saving machinery, after 

 the wooden ploughshare and the live-stock threshing-ap- 

 paratus of centuries, there was the turning of a corner, 

 the opening of a new page, the sudden light that always 

 breaks in with the sunrise of a fresh principle, which did 

 more for you than perhaps can be done again. So that if 



