No. 216 ] 503 



that they should be removed as far as possible from it. The culti- 

 vated farmer is a man who plunges into the arcana of Deity; who 

 knows the laws by which that Deity himself labors; who sits amid 

 the sweet and awful music of nature's machinery, and learns how he 

 also may produce the most perfect melody in the grain, the flower 

 and the fruit. He is a man who has seen the intimate connection 

 of the sciences; who has practically learned how soils are connected 

 with geology — how geology is linked with astronomy — how nature, 

 in all her statutes, is a many-stepped pyramid, from whose top man 

 looks out and sees the Great Agriculturist and Mechanic entering 

 into a still higher and more subtle domain, the spiritual, where he 

 may express his progressive wisdom, benevolence and glory. Thus 

 the cultivated farmer will make his business a profession which 

 can rank with any in mentality, and rise superior to all but one in 

 purity; yes, a profession which the most intellectual person might 

 enthusiastically adopt; for in a farm he would find a great volume, 

 on whose pages, through the revolving years, he might transcribe the 

 sublime physical truths which his God promulgated. There he 

 should converse with Newton, and Lyell, and Silliman, and Playfair. 

 Nor when he remembers the connection of knowledge, need he forego 

 Shakespeare, or Scott, or Prescott, or Irving. However much or little 

 we may look for belles lettres from the farmer, it is certain that the 

 farms of the United States should produce the leading natural phi- 

 losophers of the world. With them, theory and practice might walk 

 equally together. Fact after fact should, starlike, burst out of their 

 rural laboratories, until the whole firmament of physical discovery 

 blazed with truth. 



In view of the influence of science on the wealth of the farm and 

 the character of the farmer, is it not strange and melancholy that no 

 agricultural school as yet exists in the great State of New York ? 

 What does this neglect or callousness mean? For the physician, 

 schools of materia medica have been founded; does not the " the phy- 

 sician of grains " also need schools? Has nature reversed a single 

 one of her laws in his favor? For the lawyer there are schools 

 where the letter and spirit of human jurisprudence are explained; 

 can that one safely neglect primary instruction, who must deal with 

 the statutes of the arc/i-lawgiver? The minister, too, had his school, 

 where he was inducted into the interpretation of the written revela- 

 tion; the farmer, also, must interpret a revelation, the very oldest 

 Bible, expressed in the all-embracing air, the varied soil, the ancient 

 rocks, and the eternal stars. 



