422 Wisconsin state agricultural society. 
sity with us. This will probably be the financial result of your 
life, but in my view of the business, this is far from being the most 
important view of the matter. 
You should be a moral as well as an agricultural educator. By 
moral, I do not mean a teacher of any theological system—not 
even the extreme liberality of liberal Unitarianism upon one 
hand, nor the doctrine of apostolic succession upon the other. But 
I can hardly conceive a real, true cultivator and lover of his gar¬ 
den being a licentious profligate, or a drunkard abroad, and both 
a brute and a drunkard at home. The purity and the beauty of 
your occupation should teach you that it is easier to become a true 
and noble man than it is in most other occupations. And your 
ever bounteous crops should teach you ever to lend a listening 
ear to the wants of the needy and the suffering. 
On the other hand, if you do not do something towards raising 
and improving the system of cultivation about you, then you 
have failed in one branch of your business. 
You are so situated that you must of necessity raise large crops, 
or your whole business fails; hence, you ought every season to 
make a series of experiments, all aiming at some definite point, 
which, if it succeeds, will result in a practical improvement in ag¬ 
riculture. You can do this more easily than most farmers could, 
and can follow it up for a series of years better than they can ; for 
« 
you must ever bear in mind that a single experiment, however suc¬ 
cessful it may be, is, as a general thing, worth but little. Let me 
illustrate this by an experiment of my own. Last season, I wished 
to try a number of different kinds of potatoes, with a view of 
testing their earliness, yield, quality, etc., with certain kinds of 
manure. Well, what did I prove? Why, simply this: That a 
certain kind of potato, planted at a certain time in the season, 
upon a certain kind of soil, manured thus and so, cultivated in 
such a manner with just such a season as the last one was, pro¬ 
duced potatoes of splendid quality, and at the rate of nearly 
500 bushels per acre. Now, what is this. experiment worth ? 
Practically, very little, because very few, and possibly not a single 
person present, could comply with all the conditions which resulted 
in that yield. But suppose that I follow up these experiments 
with that same variety for five years, try them upon different soils 
