AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 117 



do nothing else — if he has not mathematics enough to draw a 

 hand-saw through a slender branch, yet there is one employment 

 to wliich his gifts are adequate, to wit, the culture of the soil. 

 But though a man may sever a tree without a very accurate 

 philosophical idea of the attraction of cohesion, still it requires 

 some experience to know which way the sturdy trunk will fall. A 

 man may dig, though he never heard of gravitation, and be 

 entirely ignorant of the principle that renders muscle necessary 

 in the upheaving of the soil. He may plant, and not know why 

 his seed would not draw nutriment as well from a bed of stone or 

 fossiliferous ore. He may ply his industrious sickle, and not sus- 

 pect, that in some effervescing brain there is shaping out an ideal 

 form, which, when it has molded a material substance into its 

 own image, will run through the falling grain and laugh at the 

 strength of a thousand arms. But agriculture, in its true sense, 

 is an Encyclopcedia in itself— requiring great knowledge, fine 

 powers of observation, high mental cultivation, assiduous thought 

 and study, and opens its ai-ms to ingenuity and invention. 



There are other reasons why the science of agriculture has not 

 been brought to the highest perfection in America. Our acres are 

 so broad, and every man's fences enclose such ample fields, that 

 it has not seemed necessary to devote so much labor to economical 

 production as in the more divided glebes of Europe. An English 

 patch receives the spade as many times as an American farm. 

 In the great valleys and mighty plains of the West— where seas 

 of land stretch to the setting sun — the common admeasui-ements 

 of roods, and rods and perches, are superseded by the more con- 

 renient expressions of miles and leagues. Certainly if we have 

 not more land to the acre, we have more acres to the land. 



Besides, we have an unworn soil, in original freshness and 

 vigor, which for ages has been fattening itself with its own pro- 

 ductions, and is now rich with their accumulated strength. 



But a man, on whom the heavens have showered their high 

 endowments, and filled with great capacities, is the more culpable 

 if he neglects these natural advantages, and hides his talents in a 

 napkin. So this country, fitted to become the producer for all 

 commercial nations, with its boundless area and unexampled 

 fertility, should yet the more bring all the secrets of science to 

 its aid. 



Yet, with all these advantages, the business of the farmer is, I 

 think, as a general thing, more poorly conducted tlian that of any 

 other commanding class in the realm. The farmer likes to walk 



