These advantages can only be secured to our country by AGRICULTURE. This is the true basis of national health, riches, and populousness. Nations, like individuals, never rise higher than when they are ignorant whether they are tending. It is impossible to tell from history what will be the effects of agriculture, industry, temperance, and commerce, urged on by the competition of colonies, united in the same general pursuits, in a country, which for extent, variety of soil, climate, and number of navigable rivers, has never been equalled in any quarter of the globe. America is the theatre where human nature will probably receive her last and principal literary, moral, and political honours. But I recall myself from the ages of futurity. The province of Pennsylvania has already shown to her sister colonies, the influence of agriculture and commerce upon the number and happiness of a people. It is scarcely a hundred years since our illustrious legislator, with a handful of men, landed upon these shores. Although the perfection of our government, the healthiness of our climate, and the fertility of our soil, seemed to ensure a rapid settlement of the province; yet it would have required a prescience bordering upon divine, to have foretold, that in such a short space of time, the province would contain above 300,000 inhabitants; and that nearly 30,000 of this number should compose a city, which should be the third, if not the second in commerce in the British empire. The pursuits of literature require leisure and a total recess from clearing forests, planting, building, and all the common toils of settling a new country: but before these arduous works were accomplished, the SCIENCES, ever fond of the company of liberty and industry, chose this spot for the seat of their empire in this new world. Our COLLEGE, so catholic in its foundation, and extensive in its objects, already sees her sons executing offices in the highest departments of society. I have now the honour of speaking in the presence of a most respectable number of philosophers, physicians, astronomers, botanists, patriots, and legislators; many of whom have already seized the prizes of honour, which their ancestors had allotted to a much later posterity. Our first offering had scarcely found its way into the temple of fame, when the oldest societies in Europe turned their eyes upon us, expecting with impatience to see the mighty fabric of science, which, like a well-built arch, can only rest upon the whole of its materials, completely finished from the treasures of this unexplored quarter of the globe.