AGRICULTURE, the art of cultivat ing the ground, whether by pasturage, by tillage, or by gardening. In many countries the process of human economi cal and social development has been from the savage state to hunting and fish ing, from these to the pastoral state, from it again to agriculture, properly so called, and thence, finally, to commerce and manufactures, though even in the most advanced countries every one of the stages now mentioned, excepting only the first, and, in part, the second, still exist and flourish. The tillage of the soil has existed from a remote period of an tiquity, and experience has from time to time improved the processes adopted and the instruments in use; but it was not till a very recent period that the necessity of basing the occupation of the farmer on physical and other science has been even partially recognized. Now a division is made into theoretical and practical agriculture, the former investigating the scientific principles on which the culti vation of the soil should be conducted, and the best methods of carrying them out; and the latter actually doing so in practice.
The soil used for agricultural purposes is mainly derived from subjacent rocks, which cannot be properly understood without some knowledge of geology, while a study of the dip and strike of the rocks will also be of use in determining the most suitable directions for drains and places for wells. The composition of the soil, manures, etc., requires for its deter mination agricultural chemistry. The weather cannot be properly understood without meteorology. The plants culti vated, the weeds requiring extirpation, the fungus growths which often do ex tensive and mysterious damage, fall un der the province of botany; the domestic animals, and the wild mammals, birds and insects which prey on the produce of the field, under that of zoology. The com plex machines and even the simplest im plements are constructed upon principles revealed by natural philosophy; farm buildings cannot be properly planned or constructed without a knowledge of ar chitecture. Rents can be understood only by the student of political economy. Fi nally, farm laborers cannot be governed or rendered loyal and trustworthy unless their superior knows the human heart, and acts on the Christian principle of do ing to those under him as he would wish them, if his or their relative positions were reversed, to do to him. Notwith
standing the enormous expansion of the manufacturing industries in the 19th cen tury, agriculture is still the greatest of the occupations of man.
Historical and General all countries and ages, history records no instance of any civilization attained with out noteworthy progress in agriculture. The relationship of agriculture to popu lation expansion is one of the vital ques tions for economists. It appears that, in times so remote that their antiquity is only conjecturable, an excellent system of agriculture supported, in the valleys of the Nile and Euphrates, populations at least as dense as any existing to-day. The same agricultural perfection, at tended by much the same exceptional con ditions of the population which distin guished the oldest civilizations of the world, is still conspicuously characteristic of such Oriental countries as retain any national vitality, especially India, China, and Japan. For instance, Japan contains more inhabitants than the United King dom, and supports them without taking any food products from abroad (actually, indeed, exporting considerable quantities of rice), whereas England imports food stuffs to the value of hundreds of millions of dollars.
In the Middle Ages, agriculture was almost wholly disregarded throughout Europe, and, consequently, civilization was generally at a low ebb. On the other hand, the era of the Saracens in Spain is memorable for civilization, and par ticularly for its admirable agriculture. Without exception, all the European nations that enjoy eminence to-day pos sess carefully developed agricultural sys tems, while in Spain, the one noticeably backward country, agriculture languishes. It is proverbial that the wealth of France is not in her luxurious capital, but in her provincial acres. Belgium and Hol land, the richest regions of Europe in proportion to area, with populations cor respondingly dense, owe their pre-emi nence to the elaborate cultivation. The collapse of the Mohammedan power finds one of its chief explanations in the in dolence of the Turk and his neglect of the soil.