Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 401, March 1849. Various

p>Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 401, March 1849

       SCIENTIFIC AND PRACTICAL AGRICULTURE. 1

      There are three reasons why the second edition of a good book, upon an advancing branch of knowledge, should be better than the first. The author, however conversant he may have been with the subject when he wrote his book, is always more thoroughly read in it – supposing him a worthy instructor of the public – his opinions more carefully digested, and more fully matured, when a second edition is called for. Then he has had time to reconsider, and, if necessary, remodel his plan – adding here, retrenching there – introducing new subject-matter in one place, and leaving out, in another, topics which he had previously treated of with more or less detail. And, lastly, the knowledge itself has advanced. New ideas, which in the interval have established themselves, find a necessary place in the new issue; facts and hypotheses which have been proved unsound drop naturally out of his pages; and, on the whole, the later work exhibits a nearer approach to that truthful summit, on which the eyes of all the advancers of knowledge are supposed evermore to rest.

      For all these reasons, the second edition of the Book of the Farm is better than the first. The opinions of the author have been reconsidered and materially improved – especially in reference to scientific points; the arrangement has been simplified, and the whole book condensed, by the exclusion of those descriptions of machinery which properly belong to the department of agricultural mechanics, and which we believe are about to be published as a separate work; and the strides which practical agriculture has taken during the last ten years, and the topics which have chiefly arrested attention, are considered with the aid of the better lights we now possess.

      Of all the arts of life, there is none which draws its knowledge from so great a variety of fountains as practical agriculture. Every branch of human knowledge is mutually connected – we may say interwoven with – and throws light upon, or is enlightened by, every other. But none of those which largely contribute to the maintenance of social life, and conduce to the power and stability of states, is so varied in its demands upon the results of intellectual inquiry, as husbandry, – or rural economy in its largest sense.

      Look at that magnificent ship, which cleaves the waters, now trusting to her canvass and wafted by favouring breezes; now, despite the fiercest gales, paddling her triumphant way over hill and valley, precipice and ravine, which the raging sea, out of her fertile materials, is every moment fashioning beneath her feet. Is there any product of human art in which more intellect is embodied than in this piece of living mechanism? The timber can tell of the axe of the woodman on far-distant hills, and of the toils of many craftsmen in fitting it for its present purpose. The iron of the researches of the mineralogist, the laborious skill of the miner, the alchemy of the smelter, the wonders of the tilt-hammer, the ingenuity of the mechanist, and the almost inconceivable and mathematical nicety by which its various portions are fitted to each other, and, like the muscles and sinews of the human body, made to play together for a purpose previously contemplated – an uninstructed man might almost say, previously agreed upon among themselves. The steam, of what hidden secrets of nature! – the mysteries of heat, which could not hide themselves from the searching genius of Black, – the chemistry of water, which the ever-pondering mind of Watt compelled from unwilling nature, – the endless contrivances by which its fierce power was tamed to most submissive obedience in the workshops of Soho. The compass may for a moment carry us back to the fabled mountains of our infancy, in which the hidden loadstone attracted the fated vessel to its ruin; but it brings us forward again to the truer marvels of modern magnetism, and to the intellect which has been expended in keeping the needle true to the pole-star in the iron boat, where, surrounded by metallic influences, countless attractions are incessantly soliciting it to deviate. And when, as the mid-day sun mounts to the zenith, the sextant and the quicksilver appear, how does it flash upon us that modern navigation is the child of astronomy; and that the mind embodied in the latest Rossian telescope is part and parcel of the inappreciable mass of thought to which, "walking the waters as a thing of life," that huge steam-frigate owes its being!

      What a concentration of varied knowledge is seen in this single work of art! From how many sources has this knowledge come! – how many diverse pursuits or sciences have yielded their necessary quota to the common stock! – how many varied talents have been put under contribution to contrive its many parts, and put them fittingly together!

      But, to the pursuits of the humble farmer, more aids still contribute than to those of the dauntless navigator. His patient and quiet life on land is as dependent upon varied knowledge, draws its instruction from as many sources, and is more bound up in visible union with all the branches of human science, than even the active and stirring life of the dweller on the sea.

      Some of our journal writers are accustomed to ridicule the results of agricultural skill; to undervalue our successful field improvements; to laugh at Smithfield Christmas cattle, and at the exhibitions of our great annual shows. In thoughtlessness, often in ignorance, they write, and always for a temporary effect, which our progressing agriculture can well afford to pass by.

      But we ask our rural reader to turn up the first volume of the Book of the Farm, and to cast his eye for a moment on the triad of beautiful shorthorns represented in the sixth plate; or on the magnificent stallion of the fourth plate, or on the graceful sheep of the seventh. We pass over the points in which, to the educated eye, their beauty consists; we dismiss, for the present, all consideration of their perfection as well-bred animals, and their fitness for the special purposes for which they have been reared. We wish him to tell us, if he can, how much mind has gone to the breeding, rearing, and feeding of these animals – how many varied branches of knowledge have lent their aid to this apparently simple and un-imposing result.

      The food on which they have been brought up has been gathered from the soil – the grass, the hay, the root crops, the linseed, the barley, the oats. And how much intellect, from the earliest dawn of civilisation, has been lavished upon the soil! – how many branches of knowledge are at this moment uniting their strength to develop its latent capabilities! Geology yields the raw materials upon which, in after ages, the toils of the husbandman are expended. She explains what are the variations in the natural quality of these materials; how such variations have arisen; where they lead to increased, and where to diminished fertility; how and where the still living rocks may contribute to the improvement of the dead earth which has been formed from them; and how, in some apparently insecure regions, the unsleeping volcano showers over the land, at varying periods, the elements of an endless fertility. Mineralogy lends her aid to unravel the origin, and nature, and wants, and capabilities of the soil; and, as the handmaid and willing follower of geology, dresses and classes the fragments which geology has let fall from her magnificent formations. But chemistry, especially, exhausts herself in the cause of the husbandman. No branch of rural art, as we shall see, is beyond her province and control. All that the soil originally derives from geologic and mineral materials, chemistry investigates; all that these substances naturally become, all that they ought to yield, how they may be persuaded to yield it; by what changes this is to be brought about; by means of what agencies, and how applied, such changes are to be induced: – chemistry busies herself with all this, and labours in some sense to complete, for the purposes of rural art, the information which geology and mineralogy had begun.

      Upon the soil the plant grows. What a wonder and a mystery is the plant! A living, and growing, and breathing existence, that speaks silently to the eye, and to the sense of touch, and to the sense of smell – speaks kindly to man, and soothingly, and appeals to his reasoning powers – but is mute to the most open and wakeful of all his senses, and by no verbal speech reveals the secrets with which its full vessels are bursting. How many wise heads have watched, and tended, and studied it – the humble plant – interpreting its smallest movements, the meaning of every change of hue upon its leaves and flowers, and gathering profoundest wisdom from its fixed and voiceless life! To what new sciences has this study led the way! Botany never wearies in gathering and classifying; and of modern giants, Linnæus, and Jussieu, and Decandolle, and Brown, and Lindley, and Hooker, and Schleiden, have given their best years to unfold and perfect it. Alongside of descriptive and systematic botany has sprung up the allied branch of Structural Physiology, and the use of the microscope has added to this the younger sister Histology; while

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Stephens' Book of the Farm, Second Edition, vol. I.