Published: 2018-03-11
Total Pages: 356
Get eBook
Excerpt from The Gardener's and Farmer's Reason Why: Containing Reasons for the Principles of Scientific Cultivation Applicable to Gardening and Agriculture To no class of people can a knowledge of Nature's laws be more interesting or useful than to the farmer and gardener. It is their mission to enrich and beautify the earth. Man cannot make a single grain of wheat but he invokes the aid of Nature. Going forth with the plough, he opens the warm breast of the earth, and scatters the simple seed. A few months roll away, and over that earth, which lately was brown and bare, there wave millions of ears of golden corn. Thus man produces, by limited knowledge of certain laws, a rich store of food, of which, unaided by Nature, he could not create a single grain. There are, however, different degrees of knowledge. One man may know that if he makes a furrow in the soil, and places therein a seed, the seed will grow; and although it may be apparently dead, and be sealed in its tomb by the frost or snow, still the time will come when the leaf will appear above the ground, when the stalk will shoot upward, and the plant continue to grow until it produces fruit. Another man may know how it is that the plant grows. He may know that the seed placed in the soil held within its breast a vital germ, and that heat and moisture called that germ into being. He may know that certain elements in the soil contributed to nourish the germ, and that when the plant put forth its leaves to the air they began to feed upon the atmosphere that played around it in the breezes of spring. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.