40 TRANSACTIONS. 



be said on both sides. Probably the true method will be 

 very much like the usual preparation for the professions 

 of law and medicine, where a part of the course is taken 

 among the lectures, and libraries, and cabinets of a uni- 

 versity, and the remainder among the usages of the office. 

 For mastering the science proper, the student will need 

 such resources as few private citizens can afford ; but he 

 must also handle the tools. Without the first, he will be 

 an empiric ; without the last, an awkward visionary. In 

 the former case, his hands may be brown, and his face 

 crimson ; but in the latter, his fingers will be white, and 

 his whole management of a decided green. 



Whatever great achievements have been reached in any 

 field of thought have owed their finest impulses to an 

 educated class, minds trained by special opportunities, 

 some " sacred band," whose learning has quickened the 

 ambition of the mass, and raised the intellectual tone to 

 their own level. In the air that circulates through New 

 England, no man's position is so humble as to forbid his 

 aspiring to be one of that order of nobility. It is for the 

 common interest, at least, to provide means to multiply it. 

 If the inherent passion for excellence in what you under- 

 take, if a love of perfection for its OAvn beautiful sake, if 

 an honorable professional pride, will not compel these 

 energetic reforms, then let that lower motive, which insti- 

 gates you to take off from each acre, every year, more 

 dollars than you put on. 



This lightening labor, or increasing the proceeds of 

 labor, which amounts to the same thing, is not the attempt 

 of idlers to shirk their task. It has a better justification. 

 Take facts as they stand. Why do your young men run, 

 as by some universal instinct, from the farm, where they 

 were born, to the city, where they so often learn to wish 

 they had not been born anywhere ? Chiefly — whatever 

 explanation they may put forward as having a handsomer 

 look — chiefly because on the farm there is supposed to be 

 an inevitable doom to hard, monotonous, wearing bodily toil, 

 from daylight to sundown, life through, with no room for 

 mental expansion, or generous tastes, or social recreation ; 



