e, and cipher."
They gain knowledge enough to reckon with the hired man, to keep the
tally of the marketing, to compute interest, and to do parish business.
What more do they want? Your college-men will talk about selections and
temperatures, silex and fluorine; but what has all that to do with
planting the ten-acre lot? Timothy and red-top grew before Liebig was
born. A rose by any other name is just as sweet to the agricultural
nose. Farmers who have grown to manhood with full faith in the fixity of
their condition, in the impossibility of its improvement, are not to be
turned right-about-face by a programme. The best patent cultivator could
not root out this main article of their creed. Agricultural colleges may
spread all their blandishments; but farmers will not listen to the voice
of the charmer, charm he never so wisely. The academic roof may be set
low and the academic door flung wide open, and the academic Siren, with
new and deeper meaning, may sweetly

"Sing a song of sixpence, a bag full of rye";

but before it reaches the rural ear, it will have transformed itself
into a new rendering of the fatal entomological civility,--

"'Will you walk into my parlor?' said the spider to the fly."

Reasoning is of no avail. Analogy has nothing to take hold of. Farmers
do not grasp the chances already offered them; how should they be
expected to possess themselves of future ones? Able treatises on
breeding, instructive, eloquent, and forcible, are written and printed;
but these men continue to tie up nightly their ill-favored and
lean-fleshed kine, and are weekly dragged to church by loose-jointed
nags wabbling over the road, head between legs. There are yearly
reports, rich in suggestion, well printed, cleverly illustrated,
distributed without cost--to the receivers. They will not read them.
They may glance at the foreign-looking sheep, with folds of wool on his
throat; they will utter a strong idiomatic exclamation over the
broad-sided short-horn; but they will not go beyond the limits of their
own township to replenish their stock. They have not time nor money nor
heart for experiments. You prove to them beyond the possibility of
gainsaying that their mode is cumbrous, and, in truth, extravagant; they
will assent to your propositions, admit the force of your arguments, but
inevitably leave your presence with the remark, that, "after all, they
think, like Gran'ma'am Howdy, they'd better go on in the good old