September 30, 1892.] 



SCIENCE. 



191 



Drunkenness is an inherited disease. A celebrated physician 

 makes an estimate that one-fourth of the cases of insanity are in- 

 herited. A race of scholars beget a race of learned men, men with 

 brains capable of receiving much knowledge. Says Oliver Wen- 

 dell Holmes in one of his greatest novels: "There are races of 

 scholars among us, in which aptitude for learning is congenital 

 and hereditary. Their names are always on some catalogue or 

 other. They break out every generation or two in some learned 

 labor, which calls them up after they seem to have died out. At 

 last some newer name takes their place it may be; but you inquire 

 a little and find it is the blood of the Ed wardses, or the Chaunceys, 

 or the Bllerys, or some of the old historic scholars disguised under 

 the altered name of some female descendant." 



Of course, there are individuals and families continually work- 

 ing their way up into these intellectual classes, and their posterity 

 will rank with them. But many of us have the way already 

 paved for us in inherited aptitude and brain-power. 



Often acquired traits are transmitted until they become a dis- 

 tinguishing characteristic of the race or family, a part of them as 

 it were. Sometimes certain unions, "felicitous crosses," produce 

 an improved strain of blood and a prodegy is born. A child 

 adopted and far removed from its family usually shows forth the 

 disposition of its own people. Occasionally such a one will es- 

 cape. A generation or two may be skipped, but, sooner or later, 

 the old hereditary traits reappear, breaking out in the blood of 

 the race, no matter what the outer influences may be. Rev. 

 Oscar C. McCulloch, in an address before the National Conference 

 of Charities, stated his having traced a certain family back for the 

 greater part of a century, until the individuals found belonging to 

 it numbered over five thousand, all but one of whom were either 

 vagabonds or criminals. But one of the entire number lived to 

 be an honorable man. Says this reverend gentleman, as quoted 

 by Edward S. Morse in a late number of the Popular Science 

 Monthly : " Efforts have been made again and again to lift them, 

 but they sink back. They are a decaying stock; they cannot 

 longer live self-dependent. The children reappear with the old 

 basket. The girl begins the life of prostitution, and is soon seen 

 with her illegitimate child." 



The entire populace of portions of our great cities is composed 

 of an element such as this. Decency cannot exist within the 

 borders of these slums. Truth cannot survive the diabolic cunning 

 of the place. Missionaries and sanitary officers sent to aid this 

 people are often murdered. "This class," says O. B. Fowler, 

 "are an enormous expense to the State, a constant menace to 

 society, a reality whose shadow is at once colossal and portentous." 

 Millions of them every year start out over country as tramps, and 

 return again to these quarters as winter sets in, to live by theft, 

 crime, and beggary. Their increase is alarming. A race of 

 vagabonds beget a race of vagabonds. What shall we do to 

 prevent this increase? How shall we work a reformation? How 

 shall we treat our criminals born, as it were, out of parallel with 

 natural law ? Shall such be allowed to beget a race in which 

 their own characteristics are intensified ? Shall such be treated 

 as morally responsible for their misdoings ? This is the great 

 problem to be solved by our own and future generations. 



"It is singular," says Holmes, "that we recognize all bodily 

 defects that unfit a man for military service, and all intellectual 

 ones that limit his range of thought; but always talk at him as if 

 his moral powers were perfect. . . . I suppose, "he continues, "that 

 we must punish evil-doers as we extirpate vermin ; but I don't 

 know that we have any more right to judge them than we have 

 to judge rats and mice, which are as good as cats and weasels, 

 thought we think it necessary to treat them as criminals." 



Truly, "the sins of the parent are visited on the children, even 

 to the third and fourth generation." Truly, om- influence is 

 unending; our lives a blessing or a curse to all future time, just 

 as the power and influence of the great past is interwoven within 

 our own organizations. 



Ah, yes ! but hidden within this visible being is the real man, 

 the overcomer, the spirit pure as when it left the Creator to be 

 incarnated in mortal flesh. That let us recognize. Let us know 

 ourselves, our faults and virtues, the chains that bind us, the aids 

 that have been given us ; but let us so recognize our own spirit 



lives, our real selves; let us so far become individualists that we 

 are masters and not slaves to inherited tendencies. And let us 

 attempt to solve this great problem, here cited, for the good of 

 our fellow-men and the strengthening and bettering of future 

 generations. 



A CONSIDERATION OF THE CLAIMS OF CHEMISTRY AS 

 THE BASIS OF MODERN AGRICULTURE. 



BY FRANK T. SHUTT, M.A., CHIEF CHEMIST, DOMINION EXPERIMENTAL 

 FARMS, OTTAWA, CANADA. 



Agriculture may be considered at once the oldest of all arts 

 and the youngest of the sciences. It has always had for its object 

 the economic production of plants and animals and the materials 

 elaborated by them during their life. This fact gives us a defini- 

 tion for the term agriculture that was as correct centuries ago as 

 it is now. 



Until comparatively late years agriculture existed, as far as the 

 farmer was concerned, as an art only. The application of scien- 

 tific or classified knowledge to the feeding of plants and animals 

 began with the researches of Liebig and Davy in the early part of 

 the present century. Since then an ever-increasing band of sci- 

 entists — now spread over the civilized world — has been studying 

 this vast subject with gratifying results. Agriculture, properly 

 so called, has now passed beyond the ranks of empiricism and en- 

 tered the realms of science. 



Strictly speaking, agriculture should not be called a science. 

 The problems which it presents call for their solution upon chem- 

 istry, botany, zoology, geology, and physics. Mechanics are also 

 more or less closely connected with agriculture as an art, and 

 have been of immeasurable value in reducing the cost as well as 

 increasing the yield of field-crops. 



It is to chemistry and animal and vegetable physiology, hovp- 

 ever, that we look for the answers of innumerable questions that 

 are continually arising in the development of those living things 

 which the farmer has to deal with. Indeed, a little reflection 

 will convince us that it is diiHcult to state an agricultural problem 

 that does not make demands upon chemistry and physiology for 

 its solution. 



Chemistry has to do with the composition of all matter, inert and 

 living, and the changes which such is constantly undergoing. The 

 conversion of soil substances and the constituents of the air into 

 vegetable tissues, and the formation from these of animal tissues 

 and products, though not as yet fully understood, are, neverthe- 

 less, truly chemical changes. Looked at chemically, we see 

 nature as the work-shop, plants and animals as the chief agencies, 

 man as the director. The material worked with consists of a 

 limited number of elementary substances and their compounds ; 

 plants and animals are continually performing with this material 

 the operations of analysis and synthesis. 



Physiology treats of the functions of living things and their 

 various organs ; it seeks to explain with the aid of chemistry all 

 the phenomena of life. Living matter is made up of cells capable 

 of nutrition and reproduction. As the result of cell development, 

 animal and plant tissues are formed. The changes which take 

 place in these cells, primarily leading to their nutrition, and sec- 

 ondarily to their reproduction, are true chemical transformations. 

 It becomes clear, therefore, that physiology is largely chemistry, 

 and that the latter science in many instances furnishes the foun- 

 dation and explanation of vital or physiological processes. 



Thus we establish the claim that chemistry forms the basis of 

 scientific agriculture. 



Leaving with this brief outline of the fundamental importance 

 of chemistry in the abstract to agriculture, let us proceed to ex- 

 amine somewhat more in detail the aid that this science gives to 

 the farmer. To pursue economically and intelligently, modern 

 agriculture in any of its branches requu-es an application of the 

 principles of chemistry, since every farm operation, whether per- 

 formed by nature or man, implies, as may be inferred from what 

 has already been said, changes of material which can only be ex- 

 plained by chemistry and its twin-sister science, physiology. 

 ^. Chemistry affords definite knowledge as to the amounts of the 

 several constituents taken from the soil by field-crops, thus indi. 



