30 The Ottawa Naturalist. 



peculiar requirements of our farm crops are ascertained and 

 economical means of supplying these wants are suggested. 

 After studying the conversion of soil substances and of the 

 constituents of the air into vegetable tissues, chemistry further 

 endeavours to learn the function of these latter when used as 

 food by animals. Thus, experimental research has shown that 

 starch, sugar, gums, etc. (the class of nutrients known generally 

 under the term carbohydrates) fibre and oil, products of vegetable 

 metabolism are chiefly of service in the animal system in 

 producing heat and supplying energy for work, while the 

 albuminoids or nitrogenous organic matter elaborated by 

 plants find their chief function as flesh formers and in supplying 

 the requisite constituents for the production of blood, milk, wool, 

 etc. 



It may be urged that these are for the most part questions 

 of vegetable and animal physiology, and rightly so ; but 

 is not physiology a name for that special branch of chemistry 

 that seeks to explain the changes in matter that attend 

 or are produced by the vital functions of plants and animals ? 

 At all events, physiology is largely chemistry, for if the 

 former science tells us that living matter is composed of cells 

 capable of nutrition and reproduction, the latter shows how 

 the changes of the matter within the cells, primarily leading to 

 their nutrition, and secondarily to their reproduction, are true 

 chemical transformations. 



Concerning Agriculture, we may say, adopting a defini- 

 tion given for English grammar by an old author that it is " both 

 a science and an art." It is the oldest of all arts, save perhaps 

 that of the chase. The art of husbandry includes and imparts skill 

 in all farming operations — draining, plowing, harrowing, seeding, 

 cultivating, harvesting, threshing, and indeed all work concerning 

 the culture of the field and the care of farm animals. Of late 

 years great progress has been made in agriculture as an art,and this 

 principally through the introduction and assistance of improved 

 implements and machinery. The sickle and the flail are almost 

 forgotten instruments of the past, and many of the implements — 



