Peoceedings of the Farmers' Club. 351 



axiom that tlie soil is simply a means by which certain materials are 

 converted into other substances endowed with vei^etable life, and 

 capable, in their turn, of providing food for man and animals. Hav- 

 ing spoken thus of chemistry and its applications, may not a few 

 words be due to the chemists themselves, and the part that they may 

 reasonably be expected to bear in the advancement of agriculture. 

 And here it may be remarked, that this part will be quite different 

 in some important respects from that held by the noted men who 

 molded agricultural chemistry into a distinct branch of science, and 

 gave us our most valuable knowledge on these topics. It was their 

 mission to discover, their task to search out secrets in the great labo- 

 ratory of nature, and to unfold them to the ken of others for utiliza- 

 tion in practice, and they did their work well ; so well that the oppor- 

 tunities for making great and startling discoveries is narrowed to 

 finding out how to use the information we possess, rather than 

 in extending the boundaries of chemical knowledge. In the infancy 

 of the science De Saussure investigated with surprising care and 

 accuracy the phenomena attendant upon the life of plants, and 

 pointed out the bearings which these phenomena have upon the prac- 

 tical processes of tillage. After this, now nearly sixty years ago. Sir 

 Humphrey Davy published his celebrated tM^elve lectures on chem- 

 istry in its relations with agriculture, and made many suggestions 

 regarding the manner in which chemical truths could be usefully 

 applied in farming operations. Although these writings produced 

 but little effect at the time of their publication, yet by adding to the 

 common stock of information and showing the importance of the sub- 

 ject, they prepared the way for those who, thirty years after, Bous- 

 singault in France, Liebig in England, and Professor Mapes in our 

 own country, still further extended the limits of our knowledge 

 regarding the growth and recpiirements of plants, the composition 

 and capabilities of soils, the action and the nature of manures, and 

 deduced rules for the practical application of such knowledge to the 

 functions of the farm. This was their work. "What they left undone 

 in mere discovery, and that which they failed to accomplish in th« 

 generalization of principles, of course, remains to be completed by 

 others. But this is only a small part of the labor, only a minute frac- 

 tion of the opportunities of the agricultural chemist of the present 

 and of the future. His great work must be to take the knowledge 

 that now lies idle in the leaves of books in the unused products of 

 the laboratory, in the truths laid down by scientific men but com- 



