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Intellect In Agriculture


If a man whose capital consists of the clothes on his back, $5 in his

pocket, and an ax over his right shoulder, undertakes to hew for himself

a farm out of the primitive forest, he must of course devote some years

to rugged manual labor, or he will fail of success. It is indeed

possible that he should find others, even on the rude outposts of

civilization, who will hire them to teach school, or serve as county

clerk,
r survey lands, or do something else of like nature: thus

enabling him to do his chopping trees, and rolling logs, and breaking up

his stumpy acres, by proxy; but the fair presumption is that he will

have to chop and log, and burn off and fence, and break up, by the use

of his own proper muscle; and he must be energetic and frugal, as well

as fortunate, if he gets a comfortable house over his head, with forty

arable acres about him, at the end of fifteen years' hard work. If he

has brains, and has been well educated, he may possibly shorten this

ordeal to ten years; but, should he begin by fancying hard work beneath

him, or his abilities too great to be squandered in bushwhacking, he is

very likely to come out at the little end of the horn, and, straggling

back to some populous settlement, more needy and seedy than when he set

forth to wrest a farm from the wilderness, declare the pioneer's life

one of such dreary, hopeless privation that no one who can read or

cypher ought ever to attempt it.



A poor man, who undertakes to live by his wits on a farm that he has

bought on credit, is not likely to achieve a brilliant success; but the

farmer whose hand and brain work in concert will never find nor fancy

his intellect or his education too good for his calling. He may very

often discover that he wasted months of his school-days on what was

ill-adapted to his needs, and of little use in fighting the actual

battle of life; but he will at the same time have ample reason to lament

the meagerness and the deficiency of his knowledge.



I hold our average Common Schools defective, in that they fail to teach

Geology and Chemistry, which in my view are the natural bases of a

sound, practical knowledge of things--knowledge which the farmer, of all

men, can least afford to miss. However it may be with others, he vitally

needs to understand the character and constitution of the soil he must

cultivate, the elements of which it is composed, and the laws which

govern their relations to each other. Instruct him in the higher

mathematics if you will, in logic, in meteorology, in ever so many

languages; but not till he shall have been thoroughly grounded in the

sciences which unlock for him the arcana of Nature; for these are

intimately related to all he must do, and devise, and direct, throughout

the whole course of his active career. Whatever he may learn or dispense

with, a knowledge of these sciences is among the most urgent of his

life-long needs.



Hence, I would suggest that a simple, lucid, lively, accurate digest of

the leading principles and facts in Geology and Chemistry, and their

application to the practical management of a farm, ought to constitute

the Reader of the highest class in every Common School, especially in

rural districts. Leave out details and recipes, with directions when to

plant or sow, etc.; for these must vary with climates, circumstances,

and the progress of knowledge; but let the body and bones, so to speak,

of a primary agricultural education be taught in every school, in such

terms and with such clearness as to commend them to the understanding of

every pupil. I never yet visited a school in which something was not

taught which might be omitted or postponed in favor of this.



Out of school and after school, let the young farmer delight in the

literature illustrative of his calling--I mean the very best of it. Let

him have few agricultural books; but let these treat of principles and

laws rather than of methods and applications. Let him learn from these

how to ascertain by experiment what are the actual and pressing needs of

his soil, and he will readily determine by reflection and inquiry how

those needs may be most readily and cheaply satisfied.



All the books in the world never of themselves made one good farmer;

but, on the other hand, no man in this age can be a thoroughly good

farmer without the knowledge which is more easily and rapidly acquired

from books than otherwise. Books are no substitute for open-eyed

observation and practical experience; but they enable one familiar with

their contents to observe with an accuracy, and experiment with an

intelligence, that are unattainable without them. The very farmer who

tells you that he never opened a book which treats of Agriculture, and

never wants to see one, will ask his neighbor how to grow or cure

tobacco, or hops, or sorgho, or any crop with which he is yet

unacquainted, when the chances are a hundred to one that this particular

neighbor cannot advise him so well as the volume which embodies the

experience of a thousand cultivators of this very plant instead of

barely one. A good book treating practically of Agriculture, or of some

department therein, is simply a compendium of the experience of past

ages combined with such knowledge as the present generation have been

enabled to add thereto. It may be faulty or defective on some points; it

is not to be blindly confided in, nor slavishly followed--it is to be

mastered, discussed, criticised, and followed so far as its teachings

coincide with the dictates of science, experience, and common sense. Its

true office is suggestion; the good farmer will lean upon and trust it

as an oracle only where his own proper knowledge proves entirely

deficient.



By-and-by, it will be generally realized that few men live or have lived

who cannot find scope and profitable employment for all their intellect

on a two-hundred-acre farm. And then the farmer will select the

brightest of his sons to follow him in the management and cultivation of

the paternal acres, leaving those of inferior ability to seek fortune in

pursuits for which a limited and special capacity will serve, if not

suffice. And then we shall have an Agriculture worthy of our country and

the age.



Meantime, let us make the most of what we have, by diffusing, studying,

discussing, criticizing, Liebig's Agricultural Chemistry, Dana's Muck

Manual, Waring's Elements, and the books that each treat more especially

of some department of the farmer's art, and so making ourselves

familiar, first, with the principles, then with the methods, of

scientific, efficient, successful husbandry. Let us, who love it, treat

Agriculture as the elevated, ennobling pursuit it might and should be,

and thus exalt it in the estimation of the entire community.



We may, at all events, be sure of this: Just so fast and so far as

farming is rendered an intellectual pursuit, it will attract and retain

the strongest minds, the best abilities, of the human race. It has been

widely shunned and escaped from, mainly because it has seemed a calling

in which only inferior capacities were required or would be rewarded.

Let this error give place to the truth, and Agriculture will win

votaries from among the brightest intellects of the race.



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