f husbandry as a mystery. And so it is; a
mystery then, and a mystery now. Nothing tries my patience more than to
meet one of those billet-headed farmers who--whether in print or in
talk--pretend to have solved the mystery and mastered it.

Take my own crop of corn yonder upon the flat, which I have watched
since the day when it first shot up its little dainty spears of green,
until now it spindles has been faithfully ploughed and fed and tilled;
but how gross appliances all these, to the fine fibrous feeders that
have been searching, day by day, every cranny of the soil,--to the broad
leaflets that, week by week, have stolen out from their green sheaths to
wanton with the wind and caress the dews! Is there any quick-witted
farmer who shall tell us with anything like definiteness what the
phosphates have contributed to all this, and how much the nitrogenous
manures, and to what degree the deposits of _humus_? He may establish
the conditions of a sure crop, thirty, forty, or sixty bushels to the
acre, (seasons favoring); but how short a reach is this toward
determining the final capacity of either soil or plant! How often the
most petted experiments laugh us in the face! The great miracle of the
vital laboratory in the plant remains to mock us. We test it; we humor
it; we fondly believe that we have detected its secret: but the mystery
stays.

A bumpkin may rear a crop that shall keep him from starvation; but to
develop the _utmost_ capacity of a given soil by fertilizing appliances,
or by those of tillage, is the work, I suspect, of a wiser man than
belongs to our day. And when I find one who fancies he has resolved all
the conditions which contribute to this miracle of God's, and can
control and fructify at his will, I have less respect for his head than
for a good one--of Savoy cabbage. The great problem of Adam's curse is
not worked out so easily. The sweating is not over yet.

If we are confronted with mystery, it is not blank, hopeless, fathomless
mystery. Our plummet-lines are only too short; but they are growing
longer. It is a lively mystery, that piques and tempts and rewards
endeavor. It unfolds with an appetizing delay. Every year a new secret
is laid bare, which, in the flush of triumph, seems a crowning
development; whereas it presently appears that we have only opened a new
door upon some further labyrinth.

Throughout the seventeenth century, the progress in husbandry, without
being at any one period