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HORTICULTURE AS A SCIENCE. 
While we admit the admirable skill displayed by practical gardeners, and 
view the beauties that are daily brought to light by their assiduous care, we are 
anxious to confer dignity on the art, and to assign it a rank among the sciences. 
We know that many will object to the term : they will contend that all the 
operations of floriculture, digging, hoeing, raking, mixing, sifting, and potting, 
are simply those of routine, requiring precision and accuracy, but nothing further. 
We will not contest the point with these worthy, but mistaken men. It will 
suffice by slow degrees to open their eyes to the truth, by the adduction of facts 
which shall incontestably prove that gardening is a science of the highest order, 
since it embraces a knowledge of the great natural agents — light, electricity or 
etherial fire, water, atmospheric air and its gases, and the earths. 
Botany, vegetable physiology, and chemistry, are available to, and connected 
with it. Of the two former, we shall have much to say hereafter, in a course of 
articles, one of which we propose occasionally to introduce ; but it is our immediate 
object to inquire, whether Chemistry, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, is of 
any actual utility to the gardener, or appropriate to his art. 
In the late papers upon " The Analysis of Soils," which commenced at page 9 
of the present volume, we availed ourselves of the very able Prize Essay of the 
Rev. Mr. Rham, that appeared in the first number of the Journal of the now 
" Royal Society of Agriculture," in order to divest the process of some of its most 
perplexing difficulties. The operations therein detailed are almost purely mechanical, 
yet are they sufficient to confer on the patient observer much information on the 
nature of the loam he employs, and to exhibit the quantity and texture of the sand 
which it contains. If the precepts and rules inculcated in the abstract our papers 
contain be rigidly observed, that utter confusion which heretofore has prevailed 
will be removed ; and writers in the public periodicals, or others who now freely 
inter-communicate through the medium of the post, will be at no loss to define the 
composition of that important article, loam, for they will have nothing more to do 
than to carefully dry, wash, separate, and weigh certain portions of the loam, and 
to note down the several products. 
But while we admit to the fullest extent the value of the simple process thus 
accurately detailed, it must not be concealed, (and Mr. Rham himself proves the 
truth of the remark,) that an earth cannot be really analysed, and its constituents 
determined, without an appeal to chemical tests and re-agents. So far, then, we 
have proof irrefragable, that chemistry, as a science, is indispensable to horticulture ; 
and in admitting this, we also show that, if horticulture requires a knowledge of 
chemistry to enable it to ascertain the nature of a soil, it becomes itself a science 
when it effects discoveries by appeal to scientific agencies. 
The question therefore to be examined is this, — Does pure analytic chemistry 
apply to the processes of horticulture, or does it not ? We answer, that we believe 
VOL. VII. NO. LXXVIII. S 
