THE SOUTHERN PLANTER 



37 



overseer on the same farm for his victuals 

 and clothes? Every such instance, and 

 the many disastrous failures which have 

 followed, cries aloud, with trumpet-tongue, 

 for agricultural education. The thousandth 

 part of the money, which the want of 

 proper agricultural training has cost Vir- 

 ginia, would build her ten Universities like 

 the one she has, with professorships of ag- 

 riculture, and experimental farms attached 

 to each. 



I have said, that I would endeavour to 

 show how the agricultural education of the 

 young at college, would benefit even the 

 old farmers. I believe it would do so in 

 various ways. The young farmer, when 

 educated,. would bring back from college 

 many new notions — some of them per- 

 haps of little worth. He would talk of 

 them to the old farmers, and try them be- 

 fore their eyes. Some would fail, others 

 would succeed. The veterans of the plow 

 would adopt the good and reject the worth- 

 less. Thus from the combined operation 

 of the science of the young and the ex- 

 perience, (which by the way is only ano- 

 ther term for science), of the old, results 

 would flow beneficial to both. One would 

 correct the errors of the other. The dog- 

 ged pertinacity with which men stick to 

 old ideas and practices in farming would 

 gradually, break up before a spirit of in- 

 quiry and intelligence ; and farmers would 

 learn to avail themselves of every new 

 thing which was good, without waiting a 

 quarter of a century to see how it would 

 succeed with others. It is curious how 

 slowly improvements in agriculture were 

 adopted in former times, when we had 

 few or no agricultural journals, and socie- 

 ties — when in fact we had less' agricultu- 

 ral education than we now have. I have 

 heard an old farmer deplore his folly in 

 having waited twenty years, to see if all 

 they said about Plaster of Paris was true. 

 When convinced at last, he found his land 

 just twenty years behind his neighbours 

 in improvement, and worth about half as 

 much in market. About twenty-five years 

 ago an intelligent young gentleman from 

 an adjoining county came into Albemarle 

 to get him a wife. He had been trained for 

 the bar, but had recently abandoned it and 

 gone to farming. While courting the 

 young lady, he saw the farming operations 

 of her brother ; and among other things 

 that her brother did not plough up and 



'down hill, as everybody in his county did, 

 but horizontally. This method of plow- 

 ing was no new thing then in many parts 

 of Virginia. Governor Randolph had in- 

 troduced it, and called attention to it in 

 the public prints many years before. But 

 it was new in the adjoining county, and 

 when the young gentleman returned home 

 and began to plough around the hills — his 

 old neighbours shook their sage heads, and 

 said with a sneer — " Well, the young law- 

 yer will soon quit that new fangled way 

 of driving a plow-team." He did not 

 quit, but on the contrary he lived to see 

 his neighbours adopt the new fancied way 

 of plowing, instead of the up-hill business 

 they had been doing all their lives before. 

 Now this was agricultural science impor- 

 ted into a neighbourhood by a young farm- 

 er for the benefit of the old. But the dis- 

 semination of knowledge in this way is • 

 too slow. Men do not go a- courting often 

 enough; and, when they do, they are too 

 apt to be thinking of something else than 

 agricultural improvement, to leave its im- 

 portation to such only. Knowledge does 

 not move so slowly in other branches of 

 human affairs. If a new principle of law 

 is established — or a new mode of treating 

 a disease successfully adopted — or a new 

 invention introduced into any manufac- 

 turing art, those whose interest it may be 

 to know it, do not wait in ignorance till 

 some courting gentleman accidentally 

 brings them the knowledge of it : and 

 why, except that men in other pursuits of 

 life are trained to read books about their 

 business, and expect to learn and.improve 

 by reading them ? 



At present agricultural knowledge not 

 only is disseminated too slowly ; but is ac- 

 cumulated too slowly. We get it too much 

 in fragments, by piece-meal. In one sea- 

 son Mr. A., in an able essay in the Plan- 

 ter, tells us how he has cultivated his* 

 corn crop for twenty years, and what his 

 success has been — five years afterwards 

 Mr. B, tells us how he makes corn — and 

 at the end of the next lustrum comes Mr. 

 C. with his mode of culture. Now all 

 these modes may differ — each may have 

 something good which the other has not, 

 or may expose an error which pervades 

 the others. If we could have them all 

 before us at once, so as to compare each 

 with the other, how much more useful 

 would the whole be. Suppose we could 



