482* [Assembly 



adaptations to the diversified productions of the ground, and not to 

 speak of the almost infallible criterion by which we may determine 

 their quality from the rocks they overlay, or their crumbling ruins 

 mixed in organic matter, are replete with the most wonderful phe- 

 nomena. 



Here will be a great attraction for intelligent and public spirited 

 farmers to bring specimens of their soil for a scientific analysis; and 

 thus afford facilities for the sale or exchange of real estate, and have 

 an occular demonstration of the peculiar capability of each farm- for 

 crops. And which is a great desideratum in rural management, to 

 know what seeds should be committed to the earth, and what will 

 save capital, labor and fertilization, and attain as much or more value. 



For it is a fact, well known to the naturalist, and should come to 

 the knowledge of every sunburnt farmer, that the humblest plant that 

 springs from the earth, is fed by many simple, proportionate, and 

 elementary bodies, for which there is no substitute, and without 

 which, the vegetable can never reach its perfection. So the supreme 

 architect has benignly ordained, that these elements should be scat- 

 tered over the globe in unequal profusion, and their connection with 

 climate and artificial amelioration are the beautiful but variegated 

 habiliments, which clothe all nature in the most lovely but iiseful 

 livery. 



In the same department should be placed a Chemical Laboratory, 

 where the student will be shown all the discoveries and improve- 

 ments which have been made in chemistry; a science which has 

 completely revolutionized the productive powers of man, and scat- 

 tered to the winds the wild theories of false philosophy, and discov- 

 ered the secret ways of nature in the production and dissolution of 

 all the affinities and combinations in vegetable and animal physi- 

 ology. 



The model and experimental farm, for they m&y be one and the 

 same thing, must be the student's great laboratory. Here the eye 

 will be presented with a specimen of the most eligible rural man- 

 agement, the attainment of the largest and most endurable profit, in 

 omparison with the means employed, and the most economical 

 modes of agriculture, beautifully but eflficaciously illustrative of sound 

 principles of field and cottage husbandry. 



A careful avoidance of fancy farming, or the employment of ex- 

 pensive means of ameliorating the soil — a healthy but constant ad- 



