TWO PERIODS IN AGRICULTURAL HISTORY 593 



once new and valuable nothing that so lightens and sweetens toil as the hope- 

 ful pursuit of such discovery. And how vast and how varied a field is agri- 

 culture for such discovery! The mind, already trained to thought in the 

 country school, or higher school, cannot fail to find there an exhaustless source 

 of enjoyment. Every blade of grass is a study; and to produce two where 

 there was but one is both a profit and a pleasure. And not grass alone, but 

 soils, seeds, and seasons hedges, ditches, and fences draining, droughts, 

 and irrigation plowing, hoeing, and harrowing reaping, mowing, and 

 threshing saving crops, pests of crops, diseases of crops, and what will pre- 

 vent or cure them implements, utensils, and machines; their relative merits, 

 and how to improve them hogs, horses, and cattle sheep, goats, and 

 poultry trees, shrubs, fruits, plants, and flowers the thousand things of 

 which these are specimens each a world of study within itself. 



"In all this, book learning is available. A capacity and taste for reading 

 gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, 

 or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so : it gives 

 a relish and facility for successfully pursuing the unsolved ones. The rudi- 

 ments of science are available, and highly available. Some knowledge of 

 botany assists in dealing with the vegetable world with all growing crops. 

 Chemistry assists in the analysis of soils, selection and application of manures, 

 and in numerous other ways. The mechanical branches of natural philosophy 

 are ready help in almost everything, but especially in reference to implements 

 and machinery. 



"The thought recurs that education cultivated thought can best be 

 combined with agricultural labor, or any labor, on the principle of thorough 

 work; that careless, half-performed, slovenly work makes no place for such 

 combination ; and thorough work, again, renders sufficient the smallest quantity 

 of ground to each man; and this, again, conforms to what must occur in a 

 world less inclined to wars and more devoted to the arts of peace than hereto- 

 fore. Population must increase rapidly, more rapidly than in former times, 

 and erelong the most valuable of all arts will be the art of deriving a comfortable 

 subsistence from the smallest area of soil. No community whose every member 

 posesses this art, can ever be the victim of oppression in any of its forms. Such 

 community will be alike independent of crowned kings, money kings, and land 

 kings. 



"It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a 

 sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all 

 times and situations. They presented him the words, 'And this, too, shall 

 pass away.' How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! 

 How consoling in the depths of affliction ! 'And this, too, shall pass away.' 

 And yet, let us hope, it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the 

 best cultivation of the physical world beneath and around us, and the intellec- 

 tual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and 

 political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, 

 and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away." 



