^ Agricultural Address. 
which we have noticed as favorable to morality. The Creator in 
assigning to man his employment, would surely make it no less 
adapted to supply one want than another. He creates a perfect 
fitness in all his arrangements, and it would be immoral, if not 
blasphemous, to suppose any deficiency here. But a more directly 
intelligible reason is, that the life of the farmer is one of constantly 
varied observation. From observation comes reflection; and re- 
flection, if it be not the source of a great fund of knowledge, is 
necessarily a powerful means of improving the powers of the 
mind. It improves its generalizing powers. No one like the 
farmer witnesses so broad a range of natural phenomena. The 
energies of nature are in continual play before him. He must 
study them, because they are agencies with which his business is 
immediately concerned : cold, heat, the winter's snow, and sum- 
mer's evaporation, the formation and the action of soils, the growth 
of vegetation, the dew and the hoar frost, and climate attempered 
to valley and hill, with every other hindrance or facility to tillage 
of the earth, the farmer must study, and every fact respecting 
them he must classify, and he must reduce to system his deduc- 
tions, in order to make his knowledge at all practical. From all 
this variety of facts, and a good deal more, have sprung the 
sciences, geology, chemistry, meteorology, and natural philoso- 
phy. The germs, at least, of these sciences, constitute the neces- 
sary study of every farmer. And the tendency of this kind of 
study, when well-directed, is to secure a common sense view of 
all subjects; it secures an expansion of mind, and soundness of 
judgment, to a degree not often attained by the merchant, manu- 
facturer, or the artisan. These latter, by the nature of their busi- 
ness, confine their minds within a more limited range of topics, 
and on these topics they acquire a peculiar sharpness and strength 
of the faculties that are directly called into use; but the acuteness 
of these few faculties does not fully compensate for the want of 
that broad and general development of all the faculties which may 
be enjoyed by the agriculturist. 
The farmer's calling is favorable also to an ever increasing in- 
telligence, because of its quiet and tranquil dignity in the abun- 
