BOOKS ON AGRICULTURE.

Oamaru Mail, Volume IV, Issue 878, 7 February 1879, Page 3 (Supplement)

BOOKS ON AGRICULTURE.

All the books in the world never of themselves made one good farmer; but on the other hand, no man in this age can be a thoroughly good farmer without the knowledge which is more easily and rapidly acquired from books than otherwise. Books are no substitute for opencved observation and practical experience ; but they enable one familiar with their contents to observe with accuracy, and experiment with an intelligence that is unattainable without them. The very farmer that tells you that he never opened a book which treats of agriculture, and never wants to see one, will ask his neighbour how to grow or cure tobacco, or hops, or sorghum, or any crop with which he is yet unacquainted, when the chances are a hundred to one that this particular neighbor cannot advise him so well as the volume which embodies the experience of a thousand cultivators of this very plant instead of barely one. A good book treating practically of agriculture, or of some department therein, is simply a compendium of the experience of past ages combined with suehkiion-lcclgo oo the present generation have been enabled to add thereto. It may be faulty or defective on some points ; it is not to be blindly confided in, slavishly followed —it is to be mastered, discussed, criticised, and followed so far as its teachings coincide with the dictates of science, experience, and common sense. Its true office is suggestion ; the good farmer will lean upon and trust it as an oracle only where his own proper knowledge proves entirely deficient.—New York Tribune.