454 FRUIT. 



experiments ; and how many fail who expect to get immediate re- 

 plies from nature, to questions whose satisfactory solution must de- 

 pend upon a variety of preliminary knowledge, only to be gathered 

 slowly and patiently, by those who are unceasing in their devotion 

 to her teachings. 



There are no means of calculating how much chemistry has 

 done for agriculture within the last ten years. We say this, not in 

 the sanguine spirit of one who reads a volume on agricultural chem- 

 istry for the first -time, and imagines that by the application of a few 

 salts he can directly change barren fields into fertile bottoms, and 

 raise one hundred bushels of corn where twenty grew before. But 

 we say it after no little observation of the results of experimental 

 farming full of failures and errors, with only occasional examples 

 of brilliant success as it is. 



There are numbers of readers who, seeing the partial operations 

 of nature laid bare, imagine that the whole secret of assimilation is 

 discovered, and by taking too short a route to the end in view, they 

 destroy all. They may be likened to those intellectual sluggards 

 who are captivated by certain easy roads to learning, the gates of 

 which are kept by those who teach every branch of human wisdom 

 in six lessons ! This gallop into the futurity of laborious effort, gen- 

 erally produces a giddiness that is almost equivalent to the oblitera- 

 tion of all one's power of discernment. And though one may, now, 

 by the aid of magnetism, " put a girdle round the earth" in less than 

 "forty minutes," there are still conditions of nature that imperiously 

 demand time and space. 



Granting, therefore, that there are hundreds who have failed in 

 their experiments with agricultural chemistry, still we contend that 

 there are a few of the more skilful and thorough experimenters who 

 have been eminently successful ; and whose success will gradually 

 form the basis of a new and improved system of agriculture. 



More than this, the attention which has been drawn to the value 

 of careful and intelligent culture, is producing indirectly the most 

 valuable results. Twenty years ago not one person in ten thousand, 

 cultivating the land, among us, thought of any other means of en- 

 riching it than that of supplying it with barn-yard manure. At 

 the present moment there is not an intelligent farmer in the coun- 



