Meteorology in its connection with agriculture / by Joseph Henry.

  • Henry, Joseph, 1797-1878.
Date:
1858
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Meteorology in its connection with agriculture / by Joseph Henry. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    mainly been promoted by the ample room afforded us for expansion over the most favored regions of this continent. It becomes, there- fore, important for us to ascertain the natural limits, if there be any, to the arable portion of our still untenanted possessions, and to determine, if possible, what parts of it are best fitted, by climate and soil, for the future operations of the husbandman. The data do not exist at present for the definite solution of this problem; but it is one object of the systems of meteorology now in operation in this coun- try to collect the facts by which it may be fully resolved. Agricul- ture as a science, in the United States, has up to this time been of comparatively little importance; refined processes of cultivation are not required where the products of millions of acres of virgin soil can be gathered without skill and with comparatively little labor. It is only when the organic power and material which Nature has thus stored up in the primitive earth have been to a greater or less extent exhausted, that scientific processes must be adopted in order to secure the continued production of ample harvests. The time is at hand when scientific agriculture can no longer be neglected by us ; for, however large our domain really is, and however inex- haustible it may have been represented to be, a sober deduction from the facts which have accumulated during the last few years will show that we are nearer the confines of the healthy expansion of our agricultural operations over new ground than those who have not paid definite attention to the subject could readily imagine. We think it will be found a wiser policy to develop more fully the agri- cultural resources of the States and Territories bordering on the Mississippi, than to attempt the further invasion of the sterile waste that lies beyond. The laws of nature are all simple and readily comprehended by a mind of ordinary capacity, when separately announced ; but when the conditions under which they operate are varied, and a number of forces are called into action, the resulting phenomena frequently become so complex that their investigation transcends not only the ordinary logic of the most gifted mind, but even the more powerful analysis of the mathematician. It has been properly said, by Professor Peirce, of Cambridge, that, had the lot of man been cast upon one of the outer planets of our system, the pheno- mena of the motions of the heavenly bodies, as viewed from this point, would have been so complex and apparently irregular, that our present state of civilization, resting as it does on the princi- ples of science, beginning with astronomy, the most perfect, would not have existed. Man would never have arrived at the definite idea and the conclusive evidence of the universality of causation, or, in other words, at the fact that, amid all the apparently con- fused and accidental occurrences that we observe, a few simple laws, which constantly diminish in number as our views become more extended, govern all events, whether they be those which we refer to order and succession, or those which, in our ignorance, we ascribe to chance. Astronomy is the most perfect of all the sciences, not only because it has been longer studied, but more especially because it