136 COUNTY AGRICULTURAL SOCIETIES. 
$ 
to work in the dark ; or, like a mill-horse, go because he is 
driven. y 
What we first need is an Agricultural College, located as 
centrally as possible, with every facility for practicing Agri¬ 
culture in all its branches. The young farmers might there 
acquire a thorough knowledge, combining theory with practice 
and observation. With necessary endowments and foundations 
for professorships, with proper men to indicate the undertak¬ 
ings, with nothing to distract their minds from the vast fields 
of investigation about to be explored, the grand work of dis¬ 
covery and demonstrative experiment would be commenced 
under the most favorable circumstances. All theories would 
be brought to the same unfailing tests that men of other scien¬ 
ces usually employ. Nothing would be taken for granted, and 
nothing would be promulgated as an absolute truth that was 
not fully and demonstratively proved. Combinations of soils 
would, in time, be determined with unfailing accuracy. The 
law of fertilizers would be gradually unfolded, the science of 
Agriculture would begin to assume a tangible and certain form; 
it would begin to possess attractions which all the speculations 
in our present state of knowledge could never give. 
Shall the beautiful and fertile State of Wisconsin be much 
longer without its Agricultural College? — particularly when 
some of the older States have not only endowed theirs, but 
Minnesota, so recently admitted into the Union, has also taken 
similar steps. 
In reference to these interests of our State, legislation has 
been purblind. Mere literature has had its schools richly en¬ 
dowed and generously endowed by the State ; farmers contrib¬ 
uting their share, until, having become an abstraction, it looks 
down, in its lawn and from its velvet chair, at the soiled bro- 
gans of Agriculture, and, with a stare, asks, “ Who art thou? 
—step aside !” And Agriculture stands aside ; she humbles 
herself, forgetful of the unquestionable nobleness of her nature 
—forgetting whose fingers curiously adjusted every part of her 
beautiful and wonderful organism; 
