08 



DRY FARMING CONGRESS. 



"The solemnly logical intelligence ignores their existence. It does 

 not trouble itself about anything which does not belong to its system. The 

 system itself has such perfect beauty that it is its own excuse for being. 



"More sensitive and less self-centered natures do not find the way 

 so eas}'. They allow themselves to be worried by the incongruities which 

 they cannot ignore. It seems to them that whenever they are in earnest the 

 world conspires to mock them. Continually they feel that intellect and 

 conscience are insulted by whipper-snappers of facts that have no right 

 to be in an orderly universe. They can expose a lie and feel a certain 

 superiority in doing it; but a little unclassified truth downs them to their 

 wits' end. There it stands in all its shameless actuality asking, 'What do 

 you make of me?'" 



"Just here comes the beneficent mission of humor. It takes these un- 

 assorted realities that are the despair of the sober intelligence, and extracts 

 from them pure joy. If life depends on the perpetual adjustment of the 

 organism to its environment, humor is the means by which the intellectual 

 life is sustained on those occasions where the expected environment is 

 not there; the afijustment must be made without a moment's warning to 

 an altogether new set of conditions. 



"Humor is impossible to the man of one idea. There must be at 

 least two ideas moving in opposite directions so that there may be a col- 

 lision. Such an accident does not happen in a 'mind under economical 

 management that runs only one train of thought a day.' " 



Considering the Trans-Missouri Dry Farming Congress as a some- 

 what complex machine made up of many parts that have not yet been 

 perfectly fitted together, I will attempt to define briefly what I conceive 

 to be the function of the office of Dry Land Agriculture as a part of this 

 machine, relying upon your sense of humor to dispose of any incongruities 

 that may appear. 



I will again quote briefly from the same author in his essay on the 

 "Honorable Points of Ignorance." 



"It must have occurred to every serious person that the pursuit of 

 knowledge is not what it once was. Time was when to know seemed the 

 easiest thing in the world. All that a man had to do was to assert dog- 

 matically that a thing was so and then argue it out with someone who had 

 even less acquaintance with the subject than he had. He was not hampered 

 by a rigid scientific method, nor did he need to make experiments, which 

 dfter all might not strengthen his position. The chief thing was a certain 

 tenacity of opinion which would enable him in Pope's phrase, 'to hold the 

 eel of science by the tail.' There were no troublesome experts to cast 

 discredit on the slippery sport. If a man had a knack at metaphysics and 

 a fine flow of technical language, he could satisfy all reasonable curiosity 

 about the Universe. It was the golden age of the amateur when certainty 

 could be had for the asking, and one could stake out any part of the wide 

 domain of human interest and hold it by right of squatter sovereignty. 

 But in these days the man who aspires to know must do something more 



