ADDRESS. 35 



bred scientific manipulator, if the case were transferred to 

 the laboratory, would not despise himself for leaving out. 



The same necessity "for thoroughness exists in all other 

 branches of the business. When you take up a lump of 

 premium butter, you have hold of what seems to be a very 

 simple, home-made fact, and a very pleasant one. But 

 this fact has an antecedent biography, — and before the 

 oily cake has slipped through your fingers, or elsewhere, 

 if you are a good farmer, and a good Yankee, you have 

 at least a dozen questions to ask about it, — how the fact 

 has come to be, — all the way from the cow and the cow's 

 mother, and grandparents, on to the toast. You want a 

 written natural history of this lump, ab ovo usque ad ma- 

 lum. 



Nor is farming singular, in this respect, among the 

 sciences. Look at the nicety of astronomical calculations. 

 Look at the minute mixtures of the chemist. Look at the 

 hair-balances, and tests of exquisite delicacy, in every phi- 

 losophical apparatus. Observe the almost awful precision 

 exacted in clinical surgery. Furnish a Herschell's dis- 

 coveries without the achromatic lens and infallible mount- 

 ings of his telescope and siderial clock, with the horizontal 

 and vertical adjustments of transit instruments, air-bubble 

 and spider-lines ; conceive of a Bergman's or Faraday's 

 analyses, without atomic weights and unimpeachable tables 

 and mathematical proportions, and you may expect a 

 perfectly intelligent agriculture, without this sharp in- 

 spection, and these unquestionable statistics. Why should 

 you desire exemption from them"? They are what invest 

 your calling with its lasting interest, — its intellectual 

 charm. They furnish the sort of fascination that is likely 

 to pique and attract the curiosity of bright young men. 

 I can even imagine a man's having his sleep broken, his 

 pulse accelerated, and his nerves in tension, while he 

 watches for the impending result of one of these elaborate 

 and exciting experiments, like the issue of some well- 

 matched game. 



I have spoken of the need of these tentative processes. 

 I appeal to your own experience. There are few of that 



