Very little has been written about this stupendous prosperity of American farmers. Why? Because it is so recent. The Era of Big Profits began barely ten years ago. There was a time when the blue-ribbon New Farmer was the man who grew wheat in the Red River Valley. He was the aristocrat of the West. His year's work was no more than a few weeks of ploughing and sowing, and a few days of harvesting. Even this was done easily, sitting on the seat of a machine and driving a team of splendid horses. After harvest, he cashed in, carried a big cheque to the bank, and settled down for a long loaf or a trip to the old homestead in the East. But it was the bad year of 1893 that first put the farmers, the country over, on the road to affluence. Up to that time it was their usual policy to depend upon a single crop. One farmer planted nothing but wheat; another planted nothing but corn; a third nothing but cotton; and so on. But in 1893 the prices of wheat, corn, and cotton fell so low that the farmers' profits were wiped out. This disaster set the farmers thinking; and in four years they had changed over to the new policy of _Diversified Farming_. Instead of putting all their work upon one crop, they planted from three to a dozen different crops each year. They manufactured their corn into cattle. They gave the soil a square deal in the matter of fertilisation. They learned to plant better seed and to pay attention to the Weather Bureau. They studied the market reports. And, best of all, they swung over from muscle to machinery, until to-day the value of the machinery on American farms is fully a thousand millions. All this amazing progress that I have been describing is by no means the best that the New Farmer will do. It is merely what he has done by the aid of machinery. What he will do by the aid of SCIENCE remains to be seen. Scientific agriculture is young. It has had to wait until machinery prepared the way, by giving the farmers time to think, and money to spend. The first scientist who took notice of farming was the Frenchman, Lavoisier. He found out the composition of water in 1783, and was in the midst of many discoveries, when a Paris mob hustled him to the guillotine. The famous Liebig next appeared and founded the first agricultural experiment station. Then came Berthelot--the father of synthetic chemistry, with his sensational announcement--"The soil is alive."