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ployments. Why should he not begin with the idea which is 

 to control his course, so that every effort and eveiy experience 

 may be made to tell in his general education and to bear upon 

 final results. The boy upon the farm, who is to be a farmer, 

 when he has had the proper rudimentary education of the 

 schools, should commence his profession in earnest, knowing 

 and feeling that he has commenced it. If he is put to any 

 particular farm-work, he should understand why that work is 

 to be done, and why at that time, and if told to do it in a par- 

 ticular way, he should understand why it is to be done in that 

 rather than in a different way. He should be led to inquire 

 the reason of and for everything, to think and judge, to read 

 and study, to learn theory and practice together, and test the 

 former by the latter. In this mode, and in this only, can he 

 commence his career with the same advantages which attend 

 the young man entering upon any other kind of business. It 

 is generally the first step in life which gives direction to its 

 whole future march. It is the resolution early formed which 

 imparts courage to youth and strength to manhood. Let the 

 young farmer but have a fair start, and he need not ask any 

 odds. 



In the next place, and of equal, and perhaps greater im- 

 portance, the young man who is to become a farmer should at 

 once feel and realize that the occupation upon which he is en- 

 tering is not a mere mechanical routine of labor — that while it 

 is one which may require severe physical toil, it also calls for 

 and demands the exercise of the highest intellectual faculties. 

 How absurd is the idea that the brightest boy in a family must 

 be sent to school and college, and trained up as a merchant or 

 professional man, while his brother, not thought fit for any- 

 thing else, will do to make a farmer of. While the father 

 thinks so, the sons of course imbibe the same notion, and this 

 shallow fallacy of thought hardens into real and disastrous fact 

 — and the result is, that just what is most needed to encour- 

 age, improve, ennoble this great fundamental art and science 

 of life, to wit, inteUlgaice, mind, are withdrawn from it to be 



