Various - Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 401, March 1849

Upon the soil the plant grows. What a wonder and a mystery is the plant! A living, and growing, and breathing existence, that speaks silently to the eye, and to the sense of touch, and to the sense of smell – speaks kindly to man, and soothingly, and appeals to his reasoning powers – but is mute to the most open and wakeful of all his senses, and by no verbal speech reveals the secrets with which its full vessels are bursting. How many wise heads have watched, and tended, and studied it – the humble plant – interpreting its smallest movements, the meaning of every change of hue upon its leaves and flowers, and gathering profoundest wisdom from its fixed and voiceless life! To what new sciences has this study led the way! Botany never wearies in gathering and classifying; and of modern giants, Linnæus, and Jussieu, and Decandolle, and Brown, and Lindley, and Hooker, and Schleiden, have given their best years to unfold and perfect it. Alongside of descriptive and systematic botany has sprung up the allied branch of Structural Physiology, and the use of the microscope has added to this the younger sister Histology; while these two together, calling in the aid of chemistry, have built up the further departments of Chemical Physiology and Chemical Histology – departments too numerous, too profound in their research, and too special in their several niceties of observation, for one head clearly to comprehend and limit them.

And on the plant as it grows, and as a perfect whole, chemistry expends entire and most gifted intellectual lives. Of what the plant consists, whence it draws its subsistence, how it takes it in – in what form, in what quantity, at what period of the day – how the air feeds it, how the soil sustains it, why it grows well here and badly there – what are the nature, composition, action, and special influences of manures – where and when, and of what kind, they should be applied to the plant – how this or that effect is to be produced by them, and this or that defect remedied.

But the life of the plant is an unravelled thread. The steam-frigate appears to live, and thunders as she moves, breathing fire and smoke. But the still life of the plant awes and subdues more than all this. Man may forcibly obstruct the path of the growing twig, but it turns quietly aside and moves patiently on. The dead iron and wood, and the forceful steam, all obey man's will – his intellect overmasters their stubbornness, and tames them into crouching slaves – but the life of the plant defies him. That life he can extinguish; but to use the living plant he must obey it, and study its wants and tendencies. How vastly easier to achieve a boastful triumph over the most stubborn mineral matter, than to mould to man's will the humblest flower that grows!

And each new plant brings with it new conditions of life, new wants, new virtues, new uses, new whims, if we may so speak, to be humoured. The iron, and the timber, and the brass are always one and the same to the mechanist; but with the constitution of each new plant, and its habits, a new series of difficulties opens up to the cultivator, which only time and experience, and much study, can overcome.

But mechanics also exert much influence upon the culture of the soil, and the rearing of useful plants. And though the greatest achievements of mechanical skill were not first made on her behalf, yet even the steam-engine may be said to have become auxiliary to agriculture; and the thousand ingenious implements which Northampton and York exhibited at their recent anniversaries, showed in how many quarters, and to how large an extent, the purely mechanical and constructive arts are expending their strength in promoting her cause.

On meteorology, which studies the aërial meteors – registers, tabulates, and gives even a local habitation and a form to winds, hurricanes, and typhoons – the progress of the navigator much depends. They hinder or hasten his progress; but he overcomes them at last. But atmospheric changes are vital things to the plant and to the soil. Where no rain falls, the plant withers and dies. If too much falls, it becomes sickly, and fails to yield a profitable crop. If it falls too frequently, though not in too large quantity on the whole, one plant luxuriates and rejoices in the genial season, while another with difficulty produces a half return. If it falls at unseasonable times, the seed is denied admission into the ground in spring, or the harvest refuses to ripen in the autumn.

So the warmth and the sunshine, and the evening dews and the fogs, and the electric condition of the air – its transparency and its varying weight – and prevailing winds and hoar-frosts, and blights and hail-storms, and the influence of the heavenly bodies on all these conditions – with all these things the interests of the plant and the soil demand that scientific agriculture should occupy herself. On every single branch of knowledge to which we have alluded, the power and skill profitably to influence the plant are dependent.

And for what purpose does the plant spring up, the soil feed and nourish it, and the blessed sun mature its seeds? To adorn, no doubt, the surface of the beautiful earth, and to keep alive and propagate its species; but principally to nourish the animal races which supply food and yield their service to man. And, upon the study of this nurture and feeding of the animal races, how much intellect has been expended! Has the stoker who heaps coals upon the engine fire, and turns one tap occasionally to maintain the water-level in the boiler, or another to give passage to the steam – and thus keeps the pile-driver, or the coal-drawer, or the tin mine, or the locomotive, or the steam-boat, or the colossal pumps of the Haarlem lake, in easy and continuous operation – has he, or has the man who curiously watches his operations – have either of them any idea of the long days of intellectual toil – of the sleepless nights, during which invention was on the rack – of the mental dejection and throes of suffering, under which new thoughts were born – of the lives of martyred devotion which have been sacrificed, while, or in order that the machine, which is so obediently simple and easily managed, was or might be brought to its present perfection? Yet all this has been, and has been suffered by men now gone, though the ignorance of the humble workman, little more thoughtful than the iron he works with, fails either to feel or to understand it.

And so too often it is with you who feed, and with you who look at the simple process of feeding stock. As the turnip and the barley, and the oats and the linseed, and the beans, are placed before the almost perfect short-horn, or the graceful Ayrshire, or the untamed West Highlander, or the stately stallion, or the well-bred Leicester or Cheviot ram, or the cushioned and padded Berkshire porker – how little do you know or think of the science, and long skill, and intellectual labour, which have been expended in preparing what is to you so simple! It is not without and beyond the ranks of the agricultural community only that we need look for those who lessen the intellectual character of rural industry, and of the rural life. Too many of our practical men, even of high pretensions, are themselves only the stokers of the agricultural machine; and, like ungrateful and degenerate children, in their ignorance deny the head of the mother that bred and fed them. 2 2 In a recent number of the North British Agriculturist , it is stated that an agricultural stoker, who thought himself qualified to discourse on the uses of science to agriculture, had astonished a late meeting of the Newcastle Farmers' Club by telling them that the only thing science had yet done for agriculture was to show them how to dissolve bones in sulphuric acid; and that chemistry might boast of having really effected something if it could teach him to raise long potatoes, as he used to do, or to grow potato instead of Tartary oats, as his next-door neighbour could do. No wonder the shrewd Tyne-siders were astonished.