Author Description

Excerpt from Address Delivered Before the Montgomery County Agricultural Society My Dear Sir: I have received your note of the 11th inst., communicating a copy of a resolution passed on the previous day, by the Montgomery County Agricultural Society. In compliance with the request contained in it, I send you for publication, a copy of the Address referred to. It will give me the sincerest pleasure, if my imperfect delineation of Mr Roberts's career should have the effect of awakening among the farmers of Montgomery County an increased interest in the concerns of systematic husbandry. This subject lay near to his heart. He believed that much could be accomplished through the instrumentality of societies such as yours, if the farmers would meet periodically and give to each other the results of their individual experience. In this way, he thought, the geological properties of the various soils in the district would be ascertained, plausible theories could be tested, empiricism exposed, and practical truth established. Another favorite idea, which he often expressed, was that pecuniary premiums should not be awarded, but that they should be distributed in books of acknowledged value on agriculture. I respectfully submit this suggestion to the thoughtful consideration of your members, whose object it is to foster the spirit of improvement by every means which can excite and stimulate it. I am aware that much prejudice exists against what is called book farming, but this prejudice ought to cease when we reflect how much aid practical farmers have derived from the press, and that it is chiefly through that medium we can obtain the experience and knowledge of other meu. For example, what intelligent fanner, who has no higher ambition than to make his acres yield a profitable return for his labor, can afford to be without some good Agricultural Dictionary? Of such manuals, the Farmer's and Planter's Encyclopedia by Johnson, as improved and adapted to th