MICHIGAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
85 
to t lie operation of farms especially to the extent that this necessitates 
the unifying of farm operations. Agricultural education is now given 
on each of its sides by a series of many specialists and it should be 
the function of some discipline in the school corriculum to correlate 
these various sides and trace the way by which a profit can be made 
from the general handling of the whole farm. The fact that propor- 
tionality may be developed from different standpoints furnishes an 
admirable means for teaching this lesson and your time-worn patience 
is solicited while this last usefulness of this great law is explained. 
A mere glance at the matter of proportioning things shows at once 
that this may be done from the standpoint of the technological per- 
fection which shall result, or from the standpoint of the cheapest way 
in which the factors may be put together to secure results. This last 
may be called economic proportionality, while the former may be desig- 
nated as the technological. Nothing indeed seems more certain than 
the fact that a natural or ideal adjustment of factors to each other is a 
practicable truth with regard to every product which is the result of 
combination and upon this basis rests the notion just described of a 
technological proportionality. 
Tn chemistry, for example, the proportions according to which ele- 
ments will join together are indeed unalterable and two units of hydro- 
gen must be united with one of oxygen to procure any results what 
so ever. In almost all other fields of combination, however, the re- 
lations of the different factors to each other are not so immutable, 
and we have a possibility in these fields, if different prices prevail for 
different factors, of making choices which will give acceptable results 
though at a much reduced cost for the whole. This, in fact, is the 
field in which the great principle of substitutions with which we are 
all familiar, has its most efficient opportunity. 
The two standpoints from which the proportioning of things upon the 
farm may be carried out are now easy to perceive. Farm agents and 
farm processes may be proportioned from the standpoint of technologi- 
cal excellency — that is from a standpoint which may be wholly dis- 
advantageous to the development of any profits. These results in many 
instances in the so-called model farms. On the other hand the principles 
which control the proportioning of farm agents and processes from an 
economical standpoint differ pronouncedly from those used in propor- 
tion ings of the other sort. The principle of applying one factor to an- 
other until the returns though not ideally proportional are never the 
less profitable, may be brought into use to govern farm organization from 
the economical standpoint while this principle would not be made use 
of to the slightest extent if a farm organization were to be conducted 
from a model farm and technologically perfect standpoint. Remarkable 
as it may seem, the distinction which is here made as to the standpoints 
from which a farm may be organized is not wholly an academic one. 
A somewhat extended reading of agricultural authorities during the 
past year or two has shown not infrequently such statements as the 
following: “Many farmers are producing much larger crops than they 
can afford to produce.” “The average farmer pursues certain tradi- 
tions as to what constitutes agricultural excellence whether he finds it 
profitable or not;” and “there is reason to believe that the majority of 
farmers are really living on the interest of their investments rather 
