The progressive farmer. [volume] (Winston, N.C.) 1886-1904, 1889-05-14
A PLEA FOR SCIENTIFIC AGRI-
CULTURE.

An Address Delivered Before the -NeW
York State Farmers Institute, Held
at Cornell University Feb. Is, $50,
BIZ Charles Kendall adams
III. d., President Of
Cornell University.
It is an interesting, and even an i'm
pressive fact, that our boantiful
mother, Nature, cannot be cheated or
-outwiLied. In all the range Of inor-
ganic materials, we find no evidence of
any self-renewing or self-originating
power. The ingenuity of mar has
never yet been able to construct any
machine that can do more than trans,
fer the energies OF nature from one
method to another. The subtle power
of steam is but another form of heat.
The engine, however ingenious its
construction, can never do more than
transfer the power of the fire under
the boilers into the corresponding
power of that machinery which it is
employed to move. Whenever we
look at one of those marvels of in
genious construction employed to drive
the working forces of u mines and
our manufactures, we know that not
far away beneath the boiler there is a
consuming fire that is eating up fuel
and that must always correspond in
magnitude with the force that is to be
employed. So it is in the realm Of
electricity, as we'll as in the realm OF
1.~ NJ of +Lo +o~ +hD,,cnnI
patents that within the last few years
have crowded the shelves of the patent
Office at Washington is able to do
more than to transfer from n form
to another the forces which nature in.
her generous abundance supplies. We
speak into the photograph and our
voice perhaps makes a record which
can be reproduced in all it's peculiar
tones, a generation or a century hence;
but we know that there is somewhere
exerted upon the machine an elemental
power of nature that is as necessary to
the result al the added ingenuity of
the inventor. We apply our ear to
the telephone, and have a confidential
interview with a distant friend; but
we cannot forget here also that some
where not far away from this magic
instrument there is a battery in con-
slant process of exhaustion that must
from time to time be renewed, or the
telephone will become as silent as the
dead materials that make up it's parts.
In the fertility of the soil nature
seems to be a benefcent and an all
bountiful mother. But here, too, she
places around US the same limiting
conditions. 1t is the all pervading
law of nature that the mother that
feeds us requires in turn to be fed.
AS soon as we begin to withhold sup
plies from her, she ceases to nourish
us; and, in the end, we are either left
to starve, or to betake ourselves to
other sources of support.
What impressive illustrations of
this great law does the history of the
world afford I! The valley of the
Tigris and Euphrates, once the seat of
great nations, and the abode of plenty
and splendor has been given over to
the owl and the oittern. Palestine,
once the home of a.great people, is
now the abode of desolation. Tyre
was a great maritime power, whose
people were fed with an abundant
agriculture, who's miners brought tin
from Cornwall, and whose sailors
brought amber from the Baltic. Asia
Minor was the sufficient abode of a
hundred cities, the splendors of which
are only in these later years coming to
be revealed to the curious explorer.
The north of Africa was the seat of a
great empire which long made it I'M
certain whether civilization was to
have it's abode on the north side of
the Mediterranean or on the south.
But in all of those vast regions it may
be said that the last sob of civiliza-
ton was long since hushed, and that
everywhere there is now little but
-barbarism and desolation.
IF we look carefully into the causes
of these results we shall find not the
least important of them to be the fact
that knowingly or ~ignorantly a sys-
tematic attempt has been made to de-
fraud nature of the operations of that
law to which l have just alluded. The
trees have been ruthlessly swept away,
and thus evaporation has oeen dimin-
ished; so that the amount of rainfall
has declined until it has perhaps ceased
altogether. For even the clouds are
obedient unto this law of supply and
demand. If the verdure of the fields,
and the leaves of the forest do not
send up their vapors into the sky,
the clouds soon cease to give rain;
while on the other hand Egypt has re-
Gently shown that the judicious plant
ing of trees may bring rain again after
a drought of three thousand years.
Gradually the east was denuded of
trees. The streams shrivelled into riv.
ulets, the clouds refused the rains of