NEWS OF THE WEEK.
SIR ROBERT PEEL has not appeared at the agricultural meetings this year ; but Lord STANLEY has come forth. The Premier has
perhaps found his thoughts preoccupied with private troubles, or he has seen only embarrassment without any redeeming advantages in the utterance of promises and professions about bulls and leases, while
the Minister's object must be to keep things as quiet as possible—
turning the comparatively favourable season to its fair account in hushing up alarms and the perplexing fears of change. Lying stifled
under a wet blanket in Parliament, Lord STANLEY rushes into the open air of agricultural meetings, to give vent to his tongue; and " babbles o' green fields" as well as any country squire, but not much better. With his wonted emphasis and vivacity, he teaches the country gentlemen what they know already. He says what has been said at every agricultural meeting this year ; only, with that happy trick of eloquence which is so much admired in "the house," he puts it as if it had just occurred to him and were really a new idea. It may be considered, indeed, that there was an approach to novelty in what fell from him about leases. He tells landlords that they cannot in sooth expect their tenants to improve without leases; but he hints that landlords had better make the improvements themselves, which would of course enable them to do without the parchment. Even here, Lord STANLEY does not go beyond what many a landowner's conscience has said for a long time past, and what some have before ventured to utter. The current novelty of these meetings is the statement made at Tring by Mr. JAMES ADAM GORDON, of a method of preparing land in a manner supposed to be unknown even to Professor LIEBIG — by electricity! " Sages can, they say, grasp the lightning's pi- moos"; and here, forsooth, Dr. FORSTER, of Findrassie in Moray- shire, like Pallas "Jovis rapidum jaculata e nubibus ignem," seizes the awful element and turns the materials of the thunderbolt to manure! Give him a few poles and a coil of wire, and he will fertilize your field for you. This is one of the many instances, daily arising round us, which seem to say that the real science of agriculture has only just begun. Things are now done, and not wondered at, which within the memory of a child would have been derided as fit only to be told in Arabian tales. They prove also the value of a liberal education to the practical agri- culturist. The farmer must not only know what is usually done by his craft, but, as society in its adult state has set itself to learn an infant science, he must have his comprehension pre- pared to receive new and surprising ideas,—ideas which, strange and unforeseen as they are, must become practical rules almost as soon as conceived. One of Lord STANLEY'S "real old farm- ers" would be unable to believe or imagine such a dressing as Dr. FORSTER'S galvanic apparatus : his very senses would get him no further than the notion that it was some juggle ; and he would laugh incredulous, while others would do. The science of agricul- ture bids fair to equal any in wondrous results; and we are re- minded that it is but one of the great branches of infant inquiry into the qualities of the planets that people the universe—akin to the heavenly lore of astronomy.
