yield the place of honour to the ploughshare. And yet is it not a notorious fact that the practice and science of tillage is sadly neglected in Australia generally? Instances of wasteful and ignorant farming are not confined to New South Wales. They are common enough even in New Zealand. Surely if a school of mines is a necessity, a school of agriculture is not less so. (I merely select mining for the purpose of a comparison, and not with the intention of undervaluing its great importance). Yet certainly if lectures on metallurgy and mineralogy are valuable, instruction by practical experts in the chemistry of soils, the laws and phenomena of growth, the relations of climatic influences to varieties of products, and the experimental introduction of new plants, new processes, and new adaptations of natural and mechanical forces to the art and practice of cultivation, whether in field or garden, are of equal importance and desirability.
The plain fact is, I take it, that from a broad national point of view, the vast importance of farming, whether pastoral or agricultural, has been much under-estimated, if not altogether overlooked. Mining speculations, commercial undertakings, engineering works, explorations, politics and polemics have all loomed largely in the public eye; but the work of the silent ploughshare, of the meditative, unobtrusive husbandman, has attracted little notice, either from the honest patriot or the scheming self-seeker. Farmers have been too widely scattered (one of the direct results, in New
