STATE CONVENTION— FARMERS' SONS' EDUCATION. 277 
part towards causing this new science to take its place among the 
older and better established sciences, especially if he should 
keep, as he surely ought to, a daily record of his observations. 
And the near connection of meteorology with astronomy would 
open up to him a still more extended and interesting field of 
study, expanding his intellect and stimulating his veneration for 
that great First Cause that has hung up in the firmament these 
myriads of shining worlds, all of them constituents of an illimit¬ 
able universe, created and sustained to accomplish an infinite pur¬ 
pose. 
The last study to which I wish to call attention, and one which I 
would place in the senior year of the young student’s course, is 
Political Economy. When we begin to make an inquiry into the 
causes of the failures and successes of the agriculturist, we shall 
not be likely to find them confined to the failure or abundance of 
production. It may often happen that when he has the lightest 
crops, he will receive the greatest income from them; and in a 
most abundant year for crops, he may not be able to meet the cost 
of production out of his net income. Trade and commerce, inter¬ 
national and domestic, are governed by laws about as fixed and 
certain as the law of gravitation, and he who ignores these laws, 
entrusts his success to chance, and places his failure in an even 
scale. He should study the rule of supply and demand—of pro¬ 
duction and consumption. He should understand the philosophy 
of trade. He should be well posted up in the state of the home 
and foreign markets, the cost of transportation, the gradation of 
products, the cost of exchange and every particular that can affect 
prices. He should be able to understand something about “ cor¬ 
ners,” and every other speculative device by which a fictitious 
value may be placed upon the articles he is to sell. He should 
look into the subject of risks and insurance. He should try, as far 
as might be, to foresee what product would be most in demand, 
and the best time to place that product in market. 
How many men daily meet with heavy losses because they have 
too much of that which everybody else has to sell, or because they 
have sold a really marketable product one day too early or too 
late. They had not sagacity enough to seize the golden moment 
when the market had reached its height aud was about to com- 
