flockmaster, more especially to the owners of fine wool sheep. The mutton sheep, whether Liecesters, Cotswolds, or Downs, are less liable to foot-rot, but where sufficient care is not taken, and they are fully exposed to the contagion, they sometimes contract the disease. As regards foot-rot, I have come to the conclusion that with untiring vigilance and plenty of blue vitriol (sulphate of copper), the disease may always be mastered.

In conclusion, allow me to repeat what has already been said: Find the variety of sheep that is best suited to your soil and locality, whether the variety be fine wool, middle wool, or long wool, there is no sense in a prejudice for or against any breed. Next find what proportion of sheep you can best work in with other stock; the proportion of five sheep to one cow, and five cows to one horse, may have been profitable in some cases, but might be entirely unsuitable in others. The rule upon which I wish to insist is this: "Keep some and take good care of them" Sheep suffer more from neglect than other stock, and conse. quently pay better than other stock for daily care.

The good State of Ohio might, I think, without lessening the total amount of other agricultural products, keep double the present number of sheep. If this and other wool-growing States each produced one-third more wool than at present, that is, if, instead of one hundred and fifty millions of pounds of wool, annually, we could raise two hundred mil lions of pounds, we might stop importing wools, and if we had a surplus it would probably find a market in Europe as well as our surplus wheat or pork.

SCIENCE IN FARMING AND CULTURE AMONG

FARMERS.

A LECTURE DELIVERED AT THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY.

BY W. I. CHAMBERLAIN.

GENTLEMEN: The day is past, I think, when it is even thought that "any fool can be a farmer," at least a successful American farmer. Sixteen years ago Gail Hamilton, that witty lady contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, wrote as follows: Only a farmer' expresses with all-sufficient accuracy the relative position of farmers; not their necessary, but their actual position. The occupation which should be a liberal profession is a most illiberal labor."*

Now, I ask, is this true still? Far less so, I think, than it was sixteen years ag); far more so, I know, than it should be; far more so too, I think, than it will be sixteen years hence. How far then, brother farmers, is our occupation necessarily, and how far actually, "a most illiberal labor?" How far is it actually, and how far possibly, a "liberal profession?" That we may fairly answer these questions, I ask your close attention while we together think over the following propositions:

First. Science is essential to the highest success in agriculture. Second. A knowledge of the sciences, especially the natural sciences, and a broad, well-balanced mental culture, are naturally promoted by the occupation of the farmer more than by most other avocations.

Third. Such knowledge and development are increasing more rapidly, and already exist to a greater extent among farmers than among men of most other avocations, except the liberal professions.

Fourth. But a still broader, fuller culture among farmers is necessary, not only to promote the advancement of agriculture, but to insure the life of our free institutions and the permanence of our government.

* Quoted in an address before the Michigan Legislature, in 1375, by President T. C. Abbot, of the Michigan Agricultural College, to whom also I am indebted for several other apt quotations.-W. I C.

1. Science is essential to the highest success in Agriculture:

Of the relations of the various departments of science to agriculture, and the indebtedness of the latter to them, I need not speak at length. The President of this University, and the different Professors, have doubtless already presented them from their different standpoints, or will so present them. I merely remark here that science, by which I mean exact and systematic knowledge on any subject, is always practical in the long run. God's laws, or in other words the laws of nature, physical, mental, and moral, are none of them foolish or simply arbitrary, nor will their patient, faithful study ever prove futile or useless, and agriculture, along with the other arts, will share, nay, has already shared, the benefits of such research. Sometimes, indeed, the study of those laws seems foolish and most unproductive of practical results. What could seem more foolish than the study of alchemy, long ago, and the thirst that prompted it, an insane thirst to pry into things hidden from mortal ken? But alchemy led to chemistry, and on chemistry rest half the arts and manufactures of civilized life. What more futile than the study of astrology, prompted by the same insane and wicked thirst (so men called it) to know the unknown? What more absolutely silly than to cut the "cone" at various angles, and sit and pore for months, and even years, over the curves and surfaces formed by these "conic sections," draw lines at various angles, and try to prove something? Or sit or lounge like Newton, and ask why the apple fell just where and as it did? Or with Galileo, and ask why the high-hung cathedral chandelier swung so very, very slowly? And yet from these three sources, astrology, conic sections, and the discovery of the law of gravitation, sprung the modern sciences of astronomy and navigation, and large portions of many other sciences. For the same Almighty power that launched the planets, comets, and "fixed stars," made their orbits like the sections of the cone, held them in those orbits by the attraction of gravitation, and planted in the human mind the thirst for knowledge and the power to gain it.

The "Swing-swangs" were ridiculed in Hooker's time, but his invention of the pendulum escapement have finally put the dollar clock in every poor man's cottage, instead of leaving a few unwieldy horologues on lone cathedral towers. What more foolish, not to say wicked, than to produce and watch the contortions of a dead frog? But follow now the discoveries of Galvani and Volta, and ask yourself how far would our civilization, commerce, and arts lapse at a single step were the results of those discoveries suddenly blotted out? Mention only two of those results, telegraphy and electro-plating, and ask where should we be without them? What more idle than to sit and muse over the kettle lid lifted by the

steam? Ah! but for centuries the steam had been lifting just such lids in mute appeal to be made the servant of mankind. But why multiply examples? Modern science, commerce, agriculture, manufactures, industrial arts-yes, the whole fabric of our modern civilization rests. primarily on studies and researches, at first apparently curious rather than useful, theoretical rather than practical, and pronounced absurd and foolish by the "practical" men of the time. Ah! a blessed thing is it for this world of ours that the "practical" men have not always had it all their own way; that there have always been men who have loved knowledge for her own sweet sake; have spent patient lives of study in in discovering new truth, without stopping to ask what immediate, material, "bread and butter" profit should accrue.

Now, as I have already intimated, agriculture has shared the benefits of such research. True it was among the latest of the arts to receive the attention of scientific writers. But already the researches of patient men like Liebig, Lawes, Boussingault, and Voelcker have been of great service, and cannot fail to be of far greater benefit in future.

But it is not enough that learned men of science should study the relations of science to agriculture. Farmers themselves must study them, both in the works of scientific writers and more especially in the actual, careful study of those facts on which alone the theories of science can firmly rest. Prof. S. W. Johnson, of Yale, who I think stands at the head of our agricultural chemists, both in extent and accuracy of knowledge, and in modesty of assertion, in the preface of his able work, "How Crops Grow," deplores the fact that he has "necessarily been a middle man," merely "editing and communicating the results of the labors of others." And he hopes he "may yet be able to give his undivided attention to the experimental solution of numerous problems that now perplex both the philosopher and the farmer." And he "earnestly invites young men familiar with farm operations, and conscious of the power of investigation, to enter the fields of agricultural science, now ripe with a harvest for which the reapers are all too few."

That call, gentlemen, is to us and to our sons. Every consideration urges us to heed it. To be successful farmers, even, we must be investigators. We must master, if possible, the best theories on doubtful points of agriculture, be familiar with the known facts on which such theories claim to rest, and then scan with jealous care the facts of observation and experiment on our farms and in our reading, to see if they sustain those theories, and whether, if sustained, they will be of service to us. We should try to know, for instance, what is known or believed as to the mode of action of the various fertilizers, the effects past and present

of sun, air, storm, and frost, on soils, fallow or covered with dense herbage.

We should know enough of the chemical elements and of chemical affinity, action and reaction, to tell whether our home-made manures are ruinously wasting by undue fermentation, by solution and wash, or by improper artificial mixtures, or for any other cause. We should not be like the farmer, who believed in quick lime and in hen-manure, and so mixed the two, and was driven from the barn by the stench of the liberated ammonia, the waste of the most valuable ingredient of the

manure.

We should know enough of geology to appreciate the countless years it has cost to clothe our earth with its present fertility and vendure, lest by a few years of wasteful "husbandry" we squander the hoarded resources of untold centuries. In ancient Ephesus a man once thought to make his name immortal by burning the magnificent temple of Diana; but the States-General of Asia decreed not only death to the incendiary, but severe punishment to him who should thereafter dare to speak his name. Of almost equal infamy shall not we deem him worthy who, in a few short years of wretched, spend-thrift farming, exhausts all of the available fertility stored in his farm by Nature, through all the patient lapse of centuries?

We should know enough of geology, chemistry, and physiology, to think and know whether in our wells we have the pure rain of heaven, filtered through the clean soil of earth, or the liquid poison from some cesspool, that shall breed fever or pestilence in our households. Enough of geology, chemistry, and physics, to decide whether our land needs drainage, and of what kind, and why, and how deep, and for what crops it will best fit the soil, and what treatment will best follow. Enough of structural botany, and of the chemistry of plants, to have some tangible notion how they grow, how they take their food, how they fruit, ripen, decay, what they owe to soil, fertilizers, atmosphere, heat, moisture, and frost. Enough of the mechanical powers, combinations, laws of force and resistence, action and reaction, loss by friction, change of direction, etc., to understand clearly the various complicated machines. offered for our purchase and use, and choose wisely between competing ones. Enough of metreology to use the thermometer and barometer rationally, understand the main causes, or at least antecedents, of storms, and thus prognosticate them otherwise than by tne almanac, or by some "old woman's rule." Enough of veterinary anatomy and physiology to treat our poor dumb beasts when wounded or diseased, rationally, and not brutally, and deliver them from the tender mercies of some all