All the books in the world never of themselves made one good farmer; but, on the other hand, no man in this age can be a thoroughly good farmer without the knowledge which is more easily and rapidly acquired from books than otherwise. Books are no substitute for open-eyed observation and practical experience; but they enable one familiar with their contents to observe with an accuracy, and experiment with an intelligence, that are unattainable without them. The very farmer who tells you that he never opened a book which treats of Agriculture, and never wants to see one, will ask his neighbor how to grow or cure tobacco, or hops, or sorgho, or any crop with which he is yet unacquainted, when the chances are a hundred to one that this particular neighbor cannot advise him so well as the volume which embodies the experience of a thousand cultivators of this very plant instead of barely one. A good book treating practically of Agriculture, or of some department therein, is simply a compendium of the experience of past ages combined with such knowledge as the present generation have been enabled to add thereto. It may be faulty or defective on some points; it is not to be blindly confided in, nor slavishly followed--it is to be mastered, discussed, criticised, and followed so far as its teachings coincide with the dictates of science, experience, and common sense. Its true office is suggestion; the good farmer will lean upon and trust it as an oracle only where his own proper knowledge proves entirely deficient. By-and-by, it will be generally realized that few men live or have lived who cannot find scope and profitable employment for all their intellect on a two-hundred-acre farm. And then the farmer will select the brightest of his sons to follow him in the management and cultivation of the paternal acres, leaving those of inferior ability to seek fortune in pursuits for which a limited and special capacity will serve, if not suffice. And then we shall have an Agriculture worthy of our country and the age. Meantime, let us make the most of what we have, by diffusing, studying, discussing, criticizing, Liebig's Agricultural Chemistry, Dana's Muck Manual, Waring's Elements, and the books that each treat more especially of some department of the farmer's art, and so making ourselves familiar, first, with the principles, then with the methods, of scientific, efficient, successful husbandry. Let us, who love it, treat Agriculture as the elevated, ennobling pursuit it might and should be, and thus exalt it in the estimation of the entire community.