What is most promising now is that these followers of the old pioneers of
France in that valley are beginning to add to their acres new dominions,
discovered by the new pioneers of France, such as the chemists Lavoisier
and Berthelot, forerunners of the modern schools of agricultural chemistry
and physical chemistry. One hundred years after La Salle completed the
waterway journey to the gulf through that valley, Lavoisier made a
discovery of the composition of water itself that has been of immense
benefit, I am told, to the farmer of that valley and of other valleys. And
then came Berthelot with his teaching of how to put together again, to
synthetize, what man has waste-fully dissipated. France's men of the lens
and the retort have become precursors where France's men of the boat and
the sword went first, and have opened paths to even richer fields than
those in which the harvesters have reaped.
There are as many agricultural colleges in the United States as there are
States; there are at least fifty agricultural experiment stations, and
there is ever new provision for scientific agricultural research.
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