DEVELOPMENT OF THE TEXT-BOOK OF AGRICULTURE IN NORTH AMERICA."

By L. H. BAILEY,

Director of the College of Agriculture and Agricultural Experiment Station of Cornell University.

A century and a half ago the ancients were still dominant authorities in agriculture. The first great application of scientific teaching to agriculture, at least in English, was Tull's Horse-Hoeing Husbandry, 1733, in which an attempt was made to improve tillage by expounding what were conceived to be its underlying principles and results. The scientific spirit of inquiry grew slowly and steadily; but it was not until the birth of the science of agricultural chemistry in the early years of the eighteenth century that great progress was made in applying science to farming. Davy, Liebig, and Boussingault, representing three nationalities, are the prominent names in this early field. The principles of chemistry as applied to farming were conceived to be fundamental concepts of a rational agriculture. They afforded a central idea around which all other agricultural questions could be crystallized. The long-hoped-for science of agriculture had

come.

In the ultimate analysis of the text-books of agriculture one finds two contrasting and conflicting types of ideas-the idea of science and the idea of business or practice. Those who conceive science to be the fundamental and controlling idea in farming start the book with discussions of groundwork of science-chemistry, plant life, physics, meteorology. Most of the older books and many of the newer ones are of this type. Those who conceive business or practice to be the unit in agriculture start the book with farm management as explained and aided by science. The former system is applied science and it usually starts with heat, air, elements, chemical action, or physiology; the latter system is scientific explanation and advice and starts with soils, plants, or animals. One emphasizes the standpoint of the student, the other the standpoint of the farmer. One begins in the laboratory, the other in the field. The applied-science

❝ An article under this title I contributed to Book Reviews, 7 (1899), No. 2, pp. 43-53. The present paper is based on that article, but is greatly extended.

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book may make its theme either physical science or biological science. It usually chooses the former, particularly chemistry. The early idea was to combine science with practice. The present idea is to make practice scientific from the beginning.

There is a third type of text-book in which the distinctions between science and farm management are not clearly apprehended, and the work becomes a compound of the two main-type ideas.

Considered as an industry, agriculture is manufacturing, buying, and selling. It is business. But unlike most other businesses, the operator is producer of the raw material as well as dealer in the products. In order to produce his wares to the best advantage he must know much of the principles in accordance with which the most successful production must proceed. In other words, he must know much of the sciences on which agriculture is based, as physics, chemistry, botany, and other sciences. But he should never forget that the practice of agriculture is an art and not a science.

These remarks will suggest why it is that there is such a bewildering diversity in plan in the various text-books of agriculture. One reason why these text-books have not been more successful in accomplishing the missions for which they are designed is the fact that they look upon agriculture from the academic point of view rather than from the agricultural. Another reason is the attempt to make them "practical" by inserting specific directions for the performing of accustomed farm operations; for these directions must necessarily be of local and temporary application, whereas principles are general and abiding.

More than a dozen schoolbooks of agriculture were published in the United States prior to the passage of the land-grant college act in

1862.

The first American text-book that I know is Daniel Adams's Agricultural Reader, Designed for the Use of Schools, and published at Boston in 1824. The preface is dated at Mount Vernon, N. H., October 23, 1824. It is a duodecimo leather-bound book of 264 pages, containing a great number of short unrelated articles on agricultural practice and kindred topics. The preface records that "The design of a publication of this nature was formed as early as the year 1821; and it was a satisfaction, while in the prosecution of it, to perceive that the occasion for such a publication already begins to be felt." This reference, as explained in a footnote, is to the report of a committee on crops of the Rockingham Agricultural Society and to the address of Theodore Sedgwick before the Berkshire Agricultural Society. Both these parties urged the necessity of a book on agriculture for schools.

The second book is apparently Taylor's Farmer's School Book, published in 1837 in Ithaca and Albany, N. Y. This is a 16mo of 232 pages "designed as a reading book in common schools. Children

may read and study in the schoolroom what they will practice when they become men. They now read the English Reader' or some other collection that they do not understand or feel any interest in, and which, the worst of all, never gives them one useful idea for the practical business of life." Taylor was editor of the monthly Common School Assistant and author of The District School or National Education, the latter designed "to show what our common schools now are, what they ought to be, and how the people may make them such." His Farmer's School Book starts out with general discussions of physical science, but soon passes into consideration of farm practice and management of specific crops. The chapter on hemp was written by Henry Clay.

The third book appears to have been Judge Buel's adaptation of General Armstrong's Treatise on Agriculture, 1839. There is no internal evidence that this work was designed for the schools, although it was adaptable to that use, but it was one of Harpers' School District Library. The original edition was published anonymously "by a practical farmer" in 1820 in Albany. It first ran as a serial in the Albany Argus, Judge Buel's paper, in 1819. Gen. John Armstrong was a soldier in the Revolution and, subsequently, United States Senator, minister to France, and Secretary of War. The book under consideration treats the subject almost wholly from the point of view of farm practice, and was an excellent treatise for its day.

Judge Buel's Farmer's Companion, or Essays on the Principles and Practice of American Husbandry, was published in 1839. The volume was also incorporated in The School Library, Vol. XVI, a series "published under the sanction of the board of education of the State of Massachusetts." The book does not appear to have been intended as a pupil's text, however.

The first distinct and professed indigenous American text-book or treatise on agriculture appears to have been Alonzo Gray's Elements of Scientific and Practical Agriculture, published in New York in 1842. Its chief theme is life, the "vital principle," and it is the fullest analysis of the biological type of presentation which has yet appeared in our text-book literature. It gives an excellent outline, also, of the chemical wisdom of the time. It is too technical even for our present-day rural schools.

The second real text-book treatise appears to have been Davis's Text-Book on Agriculture, copyrighted in 1847, but bearing the publisher's date of 1848. It is essentially a laboratory presentation of the subject. Of the eight chapters seven are concerned mostly with chemical matters, and even the eighth chapter contains little discussion of farm subjects. A long appendix is devoted to a discussion of insects injurious to vegetation. Davis's opening sentence is this: "Chemistry is that science which makes us acquainted with the com

position and properties of bodies, and the changes which take place between the particles of matter at insensible distances from each other."

The next work is Doctor Rodgers's, of Rochester, N. Y., published in 1848, and a second edition in 1850. It is a most complete and systematic presentation of the applied-science idea, running through chemistry, geology, botany, and meteorology; and it ends with an attempt to present agricultural subjects. The highly illumined symbolic frontispiece well represents the animus of the work-a scroll reaching from the electric heavens bearing the words "Chemistry, botany, meteorology, agriculture."

A great advance was made by Professor Norton's Elements of Scientific Agriculture, 1850. Here there was a distinct and successful attempt to approach the subject from the agricultural view point, explaining rural practices by the applications of science. But even here the advice was very largely chemical. This was not a fault fifty years ago, but it seems to be a shortcoming when it is used in books of the present day.

In 1851 the reading-book idea, apparently dormant since Adams and Taylor's time, came forward in Rev. John L. Blake's Lessons in Modern Farming. This book differed widely from Taylor's, however, in the fact that it presents the subject from the literary side, whereas the earlier book presented it from the science and farm-practice side. Blake had a great intellectual interest in rural life, as evidenced by his Farm and Fireside, 1852, and Farmer's Every-Day Book, and The Farmer at Home.

Waring's excellent Elements of Agriculture, 1854, reminds one of Norton's book, although it is written more completely from the chemical point of view. The revision is dated 1868, but the general line of treatment remains the same; the author writes that "the observation and experience of the intervening years have sadly clouded some of these fancies (of the original edition), and the veil which hangs about the true theories of agriculture has grown harder to penetrate; the difficulties in the way of precise knowledge have not lessened with close acquaintance." This frank admission is the indisputable mark of the honest searcher for truth. It also suggests the inherent weakness of the attempt to teach agriculture under the guise of an exact physical science. To those who have learned to honor the name of Colonel Waring as that of a practical sanitary engineer and an efficient public servant, these references to his early labors in the agricultural field will afford a new source of pleasure.

Fox's American Text-Book, Detroit, 1854, has the distinction of being the first text published west of New York State. The chemical features are strong, even in the discussion of the particular crops. It goes into the methods of growing the leading crops with considerable fullness.