Science and Farming.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIC, Issue 14042, 28 October 1909, Page 4 (Supplement)

Science and Farming.

THE FARMERS' LIBRARY. There never was a period in the history of agriculture since the time when "Adam delved and Eve span" in which farmers had so much assistance from literature, as now. A quarter of a century ago there were, comparatively speaking, few books dealing with the general details of farming, and as a rule these few books were expensive, and their scope too much confined to special subjects and to individual opinions. To-day there is scarcely a subject of importance to farmers, whether connected with the practical or scientific side of farming, that is not dealt with in the various text-books or encyclopaedias of agriculture. The farmer who despises book learning is the one who will not have a good thing when it is offered to him. He may prate of the value of practical experience, but he usually limits the use of such experience to his own restricted area, and leaves ungarnered the wealth of information stored in printed pages. One has only to open a modern encyclopaedia of agriculture to see how much is missed by the man who will not read.

I The growth of agricultural literature is one of the main features in agricultural progress. It has only been made possible by the immensely increased attention given to this greatest of all human occupations by nearly all classes of people. The chemist, the biologist, the botanist, and the bacteriologist are all now more or less interested in the development of agricultural industries. The farmer of to-day who does not recognise how much the knowledge of the chemist can help him is scarcely worth the trouble of arguing with. Tn the practice of manuring alone the chemist can make all the difference between profit and _ loss. He can show not only how to increase the yield of farm crops, but how to improve their feeding value, and in this direction might easily prevent the waste of vast stores of fertilisers and increase the returns from smaller quantities judiciously applied. The material gain from book-acquired knowledge is not the only reward that reading gives. A'-rieultural literature, or at' any rate that worthy of the name, adds an interest and n zest to work. It puts the solitary settler in touch with the thinkers of the world: it gives him kinship with the farmers of all nations; it gives to the most commonplace of daily occupation a significance which lifts the task to the heisht of achievement. To gather into one library all. the best of agricultural .literature would require the resources of wealth, but fortunately for the farmer, enterprising firms have condensed agieultur-d literature into mere -volumes, and called them encyclopaedias, and hnve thus placed a vast accumulation of information within the reach of the poorest, civing them on one poor shelf a library that a few years ago trould have been considered priceless.—(Exchange.)