who live by it. Every step must be guided by knowledge. Take the soil, for example. How shall it be tilled? How shall its fertility be maintained? If its productive power is lost or impaired, how shall it be restored? The effects of different crops upon it, the proper order of succession for such crops, these questions, and scores of others like them, can be answered only by knowledge. And then, as I have shown above, the wide range of animal and vegetable life comes in to swell the list of the problems of agriculture. How much the farmer needs to know for the successful prosecution of his work is often illustrated by the utter failure and discomfiture of the amateur.

Knowledge, then, agriculture must have, but how is this knowledge to be obtained? There are three principal ways of gaining it, and these ways give rise to as many distinct phases of agriculture:

1. In every generation, the great mass of the knowledge used in agriculture is obtained from tradition. It passes from father to son as lands and houses pass—as language and religion are transmitted. In conservaative nations like China, all the processes have come down unchanged from an undated antiquity. This traditional knowledge may be of the highest value, as it certainly is in the great nation just named, in regard to the mode of preserving the fertility of the soil. China has solved in a practical way this most important problem of agriculture, but, as it seems to the western nations, at a very great price, namely, at the expense of the decencies of life Or, on the other hand, this traditional knowledge may be very inadequate and defective, and alloyed with a large amount of error and superstition. But whether it chances to be wisely adapted to its field, or whether it is blind and stupid and wasteful, as is oftener the case, it is always the lowest grade or kind of knowledge. It does not matter so much whether the processes that it uses are wise or unwise either, for it uses both in the same slavish way. It makes the smallest possible demand on the intelligence. Just in proportion as tradition rules, active intelligence is withdrawn. It is adapted to a race of peasants only, and whoever follows it becomes thereby, and to the degree in which he follows it, a peasant. American agriculture has never come in any large way into slavish subjection to tradition, though this element is mingled with all our practice. The exigencies that a new continent and a new climate imposed upon its first representatives, rendered useless, in great degree, the traditions of the old world, and each generation since has found within our ample domain like new conditions, requiring the same measures of adjustment and invention to meet the ever new demands.

The agriculture of China is the best example of the agriculture of

tradition, plodding on for centuries and milleniums in the same unquestioning and unprogressive round, wise in its way, assuredly, or it could never have had so long a history, but making only the feeblest appeal to the intelligence of those that administer it.

Tradition is everywhere the law of uneducated labor. It benumbs intelligence, it breeds dull minds, it saves its benedictions for the stupid. 2. But there is a second and a much high source of the knowledge that agriculture needs, than that already named. It is found in observation and experience. It does not exclude tradition. Making use of all that our fathers can teach us, it still proves all things for itself. Observation and experience are, indeed, the fountain head of all tradition. Somebody has to observe, and learn by observation, before any successful practice can be bequeathed to those who come after us.

The knowledge derived from this source has a much higher character and a vastly better outcome than that already treated. It appeals to general intelligence, and thus stimulates and encourage intelligence. It can live, indeed, in no other atmosphere than one of wakeful and diffused mental activity. The common school and the newspapers are its chief allies. It organizes societies, and promotes discussion, and patronizes competitive exhibitions.

It is progressive. It is tied down to no established system, but it holds itself free to enter on any new course that promises success. It experiments in its own way. A rough and rude way, it is true, and one that gives only ambiguous results, but still infinitely better than the stolid and unquestioning mood of the system that is grounded on tradition.

But good as it is by comparison with the agriculture of tradition, empirical agriculture has still its limitations and its grave defects. It is not thorough. It does not go to the bottom of the questions that it raises. It does not aspire to a knowledge of causes and laws, but satisfies itself rather with results and processes.

It is obviously transitional in its character. It has entered on a path that leads far beyond the point of its present attainment.

I think that you will agree with me when I say that, according to the divisions so far made, American agriculture, in its better and more characteristic phases, finds its place under this second head. In other words it is mainly in the empirical stage. It has accomplished splendid results as all the world knows. It has availed itself of the enthusiasm for the accumulation of wealth, with which a new continent has inspired an ambitious and progressive people. It has called to its aid the most inventive faculties that any nation ever had. It has secured from this

source the best outfit for subduing and tilling the earth, and for gathering and distributing its harvests that the world has ever seen.

And yet it has grave reason to be dissatisfied with its results. It is exhausting in a few generations the wealth of the soil that it took ages to accumulate and that, under wise husbandry, would last forever. It is shortening its harvests and narrowing its margins of profit.

Above all, the light of a wiser practice begins to be turned upon it. It is learning that there are better answers to its great problems than it has ever been able to give, answers that transcend its range and knowledge. It knows enough to be unhappy because it does not know

more.

Is there then any other source of that knowlege which this great and complex art of agriculture requires besides those already named, viz., tradition and practical experience?

3 I answer, yes. There is a third source of agricultural knowledge, distinct from but including both tradition and experience, and vastly higher and more profitable than either. It is not only not antagonistic to tradition or experience, but it adopts and justifies all their successful practice, transforming it from a blind obedience to an arbitrary rule into an intelligent adaptation of means to ends. This third source is found in midern science.

The world is old, and man has been living and working in it for a long while. He has always been in motion, but he has not always been making progress, for he has done a great deal of traveling in a circle. But during the last two hundred years he has hit upon a new method of research that has widened indefinitely the circle of his knowledge, and made the world over for him. The method involves no new faculties, but it is exceedingly simple and exceedingly sensible. It is, in fact, an application of the best common sense of mankind to the study of nature. Its secret is experiment. A well-devised experiment is a question put to nature in such a way that a definite and unambiguous answer can be derived. Along with experiment has gone the improvement of the instruments of research until an almost incredible degree of precision has been obtained-balances that can weigh the small dust that covers them, microscopes that can disclose the size and form of every grain of this small dust, and spectroscopes that can determine its chemical composition

Under this new method and by the aid of these new facilities, a vast body of conclusions has been accumulated that have accredited themselves in this court of common sense. Some belong in the category of demonstrable truths, and others, though by their nature incapable of

demonstration, command our belief with just as strong a tenure as the truths of the former class.

Let me note a few items from the vast volume that we have acquired in this way. We have learned the constitution of the atmosphere, learned the several gases that compose it, learned the properties of each, and the parts they play in the economy of nature. We have learned the composition and the nature of that wonderful liquid, water, have traced its all important offices in the world.

We have learned the constitution of the earth's crust, the kinds of matter that enter into it, the properties of each, the effects of air and water on each, the relative abundance or scarcity of each, what ones enter into the living world, how they enter in, their offices in the living structure. We have learned the organization of the plant, the laws of its growth and nutrition, the two-fold nature of its food-mineral and organic. We have obtained a knowledge of animal structure and growth. We have learned the necessity of different kinds of food; the adaptation of these several kinds to different offices.

But I need not go further. You see that all the problems of agriculture lie in these fields or such as they. These problems have not all reached their solutions yet-some of them seem very far from solutionbut when the solution comes it comes from science, and makes a new contribution to science. Such knowledge as I have already hinted at, in regard to soil and plant, is just the knowledge that agriculture needs. It has gained a good deal of it already in a practical way-it has been starved into restoring to the soil the mineral matters that its crops have taken away-but it has worked blindly and unintelligently, and can give no good reason for or account of its action.

I think then, that you see what the relations of science to agriculture are. They are not merely of the desirable or ornamental sort, but they are altogether vital. They are the relations of bread to the hungry man, of the compass to the ship on ccean wastes, of the breaking day to the traveler benighted on plain or in forest.

This scientific knowledge lays the foundation for a third and distinct phase of agriculture. We have already found in our survey the traditional system that pursues the ways the fathers trod, and the empirical system, that depends upon intelligent but unscientific practice; but now we find a rational system, that avails itself of all the knowledge that can be gained from whatever sources-from tradition, from practice, and above. all, from the great body of exact and well arranged facts that the civilized world has accumulated within the last two centuries under the name of science.

Let there be no mistake in regard to this matter. Practice and science are not rival claimants of the same field. There are not two kinds of knowledge, practical and scientific-knowledge is one-but there are varying degrees of it. Science stands for the best and most complete knowledge already gained, while practice always marks a somewhat lower degree-the knowledge of processes without the knowledge of causes-for when we gain a knowledge of causes, by whatever means, we are working within the limits of science. Practice thinks it can succeed without science, and so it does, up to a certain point; but true science knows it cannot succeed without practical knowledge and guidance. There is nothing more unscientific than those examples of book-farming so called, in which theory and practice are rudely dissevered, at the ludicrous outcome of which the world has a right to laugh.

Rational agriculture demands, of course, a larger amount of training on the part of those who administer it than either of the other systems. What kind of training? I answer, special training.

The old curriculum of a liberal education will not meet its demands. Latin and Greek, mathematics and metaphysics, are all good in their place.

"If a man can be sure

That his days will endure

As of old for a thousand long years,"

why, he may sweep the whole circle. But there are some things that the disciple of rational agriculture must know. He must know the elements and the processes of experimental science. He must know the established laws of vegetable and animal growth.

How much training must a man have to be recognized as working within. the limits of rational agriculture? Shall he be able to conduct a chemical laboratory or manage a veterinary practice? Such claims are sometimes made, but they are utterly preposterous. It costs years of enthusiastic and absorbing study to be able to make reliable chemical analyses of crops and soils. You can count very easily all the men in Ohio who are qualified for such tasks to day. The hand that can adjust aright the wavering balance in which the phosphates of the soil are weighed, or that can safely guide the knife through the labyrinth of the arteries. and veins of the living animal, cannot be spared to hold the plow or to split rails. It is not the knowledge of the master that is required, but knowledge enough to look through and beyond the processes involved, to the laws on which they are grounded; knowledge enough to make and construe an experiment; knowledge enough to transform the labors of the farm from mere routine and unquestioned tradition, into a ration a