454 FRUIT. 



experiments ; and how many fail who expect to get immediate re- 

 plies from nature, to questions whose satisfactory solution must de- 

 pend upon a Variety of preliminaty knowledge, only to be gathered 

 slowly and patiently, by those who are unceasing in their devotion 

 to her teachings. • ' 



Th'ere are no means of, calculating how much chemistry has 

 done for ^.grioulture within the last ten years. We say this, not in 

 the sanguine spirit of one who reads a volume on agricultural chem- 

 istry for the first time, and imagines that by the application of a few 

 salts he can directly change barren fields into fertile bottoms, and 

 raise one hundred bushels of corn where' twenty grew before. But 

 we say it after no Uttle observation of the results of experimental 

 feirming— full of failures and errors; with only occasional examples 

 of brilliant success — as it is. 



There are numbers of readers who, seeing the partial operations 

 of nature laid bare, imagine that the whole secret of assimilation is 

 discovered, and by taking too short a route to the end in view, Ijiey 

 destroy all. They may be likened to those intellectual sluggards 

 who are captivated by certain easy roads to learrtinff, the gates of 

 which are kept by those who teach every branch of human wisdom 

 in six lessons ! This gallop into the futurity of laborious eflbrt, gen- 

 erally produces a ^ddiness that is almost equivalent to the obliterar 

 tion of all one's power of discernment. And' though one may, now, 

 by the aid of magnetism, " put a girdle round the earth " in less than 

 "forty minutes," there are still conditions of nature that imperiously 

 demand time and space, 



' Grranting, therefore, that there are hundreds who have failed in 

 ■their experiments -with agiicultural chemistry, still we contend that 

 there are a few of the more skilful and thoroiigh experimenters who 

 have been eminently successful ; a.nd. whose success will gradually 

 form the basis of a new and improved system of agriculture. 



More than this, the attention "which has "been drawn to the value 

 of careful and intelligent culture, is producing indirectly the niost 

 valuable results. Twenty years ago not one person in ten thousand, 

 cultivating the land^ among us, thought of any other Ineans of en- 

 riching it than that of supplying it with barn-yard manure. At 

 •the present moment there is not an intelligent farmer in the coun- . 



