Do we not
see the illimitable fields opening even beyond the vision of those men of
the crucible and retort, who are but leading the new farmers on to visible
fields of increasing richness?
Hardly less cosmopolitan are the men of science and letters who are
actually in those regions, and only less so those tens of thousands, who,
like migrants of the earlier days, are going forward, many to the
farthest, lonesomest frontiers of knowledge, but all to something beyond
their immediate ancestral lot or field.
I am not thinking of the additions to the world's learning in all this,
great as it is but impossible of appraisement. Nor am I thinking chiefly
of the industrial and material advantages. I think it was some
bacteriological discovery, known as the Babcock test, resulting in a great
improvement in the making of butter, that gave the University of Wisconsin
its first wide sympathetic support. It was the discovery by a professor in
one of the western universities of the means of inoculating with some
fatal disease, and so exterminating, an insect that destroyed wheat and
oats, which gave that professor a chancellorship, I am told, and his
university more liberal appropriations.
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