414
THE ABATOR.
learned about it what has been settled bj repeat
ed experiment and observation. It is so of law
and medicine,, only they have become more em
phatically book sciences and professions than farm
ing not from :Unjr substantial difference in the
professions themselves, but because men have been
traiued and educated for those professions and
have not jet been for farming. When the barbers
were the surgeons, there we're few if anv book
about surgery ; nor is it likely the barbers could
read what there were. Law is perhaps the oldest
. book profession, but was once an unwritten sci
ence, as farming now is. Science is nothing but
garnered knowledge ; and that men have no bet
ter garnered up the treasures of agricultural ob
servation and experience, has not arisen from their
being no fixed principles of husbandry, but rather
from this, that men have never been tauerht hus-
,;, .
bandry as a science before they entered upon the
practice of it as a profession ; and perhaps, partly
from thi3 circumstance, too, that nature docs so
much of tho farmer's work for him that he has
Leon ashamed to record his own mite. But this
state of things is fast passing away; whether it be
that nature is growing more churlish, or man more
conceited, I know not. Agriculture is fast becom
ing a written science iu the most enlightened
States of Europe, and it advances in importance
as it does so. " Mr. Colman in his able renort on
European Agriculture, made in 1844, describes
only nine agricultural schools, though others then
existed on the continent of which he was not prob
ably aware." Dr. Edward Hitchcock in his re
port to the legislature of Massachusetts in 1851,
on the same subject, reports three hundred and
fifty two schools, most of which had come into ex
istence since Mr. Colman.
Men have erred of late years, it seems to me, in
the importance they give to some branches ofng
ricultural science. Thus, a patriotic citizen of the
State of Georgia lately gave $20,000 to the Geor
gia University to endow a professors!) in of A nri.
cultural Chemistry. Now agricultural chemistry
is a good thing, but bears about the same propor
tion to the whole science of agriculture, that con
tingent remainders and executory devises do to the
cience of law, or Materia Medica to the science
of medicine. Agricultural science is made up of
the experience men have gained in the culture of
the earth j and there are certain fixed principles
of that culture, established by experience, just as
of any other branch of human knowledge. That
there are not more of thorn, is our shame ; and is
due mainly to men not studying the theorv of a-
! riculture, just as they do the theories of law and
medicine, before beginning the practice of it.
How long would it have taken law and medicine
to have accumulated facts enough to make book
sciences of them, if the Lawyers and Doctors had
never looked into a book before commencing the
practice, and scorned to look into one afterwards,?
If we made our attornevs and nhvsicians n
our farmers, they would make sad havoc of our
property and carcasses. Some persons rail at
book learning in farming matters : But do these
same men think lawyers less worthy of trust in
important business, or confido their lives to phy
sicians with less confidence because they have read
the books which contain t!;a observations and ex
perience of other lawycra and doctors ? Far from
it. Then why rail at agricultural reading?' If a
few conceited asses have rcr.d Lcibig's Chemistry
and committed foolish IknJcrj, docs it therefore
follow that clover men 111 derive no profitable
knowledge by. study hr rriirha of natural
science, which explain i . ' , 0f the veg
etable kingdom ? Scienc j h ell, from
which men draw according to tl. . . eir
undetandmgs;isdom lies at the
and it takes deep and long draughts to '..
up. The surface is covered with the into:;ic
froth of conceit, which too many have sipped an .
gone mad, and hence the stupid nreiudim n?
scientific agriculture. As well call the chicanery
of the pettifogger the science of law, or quackery
the science of medicine, as the blunders of a few
smatters in agricultural chemistry the science of
agriculture.
All that our fathers knew about farming would
now be at our command if agriculture were a book
science. Will the sneerers say our fathers knew
nothing? Who that has read the earlv vn!.
of the old American Farmer will admit it? There
is wisdom and experience enough in "Skinner's
American Farmer" and in " Ruffins' FarmerV
Register" alone, to make agriculture a written sci
ence, if we had somo agricultural Maury to exam
ine and digest these scattered stores of knowledge,
and reduce them to the form of nraetiral fn,;
directions. When Mathew F.Maury modestly ap
plied to the Secretary of the Navy for leave to ex
amine the piles of old moth-eaten log-books which
cumbered the Bureaux of the department, who
could have foreseen that the "sailing directions"
would have been the result of his patient labor? 3
Already has the world derived such advantages
from Lieutenant Maury's investigations and diV
covoritM, that his twine U ranked among the great-