Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 130]

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104

History University of Illinois

ures and quotations of opinions, the deterioration of crops and the wasteful methods of land tillage; that new land was treated as if inexhaustible, and that infertility was soon the consequence. " T h e nation/' he declared, "which tills the soil so as to leave it worse than they found it, is doomed to decay and degeneration.— Agriculture undoubtedly demands our first care; because its products, in the aggregate, are not only of greater value than those of any other branch of industry, but greater than all others together; and because it is not merely conducive to the health of society, the health of trade and commerce, but essential to their existence. But, while it is the most useful and earliest of arts, so sluggish have been its advances that we are yet experimenting upon problems which were moot-points with the farmers two thousand years ago. Surely an interest so superior, and of such vital consequence, ought not to be left to lingering routine, but the aid of science should be invoked to accelerate its pace, until it can keep step with that of other industrial pursuits of mankind. "The agriculturists have been, within a few years, aroused to their own wants. Periodicals, from a higher point of dignity and influence, have fired their zeal. The eager crowds which throng to the annual fairs of our agricultural societies, from the national down to 'all the stars of lesser magnitude,' proclaim the universal hunger there is for a profounder information touching that which comes home to their business and bosoms. They know there are mysteries dearly concerning them, and they demand of learning and of science a solution. ' Deformed, unfinished, ! experiments— 'scarce half made up, And that so lamely,' will not do. Farmers will not be cheated longer by unsustained speculations. The test of the field must follow and verify that of the laboratory. The half-bushel and the balance must prove the arithmetic. The result must support the theory. They want substance and not a shadow-bread and not a stone. They know well there is a vast force of agricultural labor hitherto misapplied, muscles that sow where they do not reap, and they demand light