Excerpt from From the Letter-Files of S. W Johnson: Professor of Agricultural Chemistry in Yale University, 1856-1896, Director of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, 1877-1900The newness Of much that seems to us to have always been comes at times as a surprise, and sets our minds to work in an effort to realize the environment Of our immediate forebears at a time when ideas now accepted as fundamental axioms were the glad tidings Of a new gospel Of knowledge and truth. Only sixty years ago, a little band of friends, born in America and trained in good part in the universities of Germany, was laying here in the new world the foundations of the great work in agricultural science which is being carried on today by men born in America and well trained in American universities. Workers, their methods and their aims make up the early history of every branch Of human endeavor. The way in which they Opened up the field interests the workers of today. These early enthusiasts looked into the future confident that their work was good and that it ought to be done, they believed that without chemistry it never could be done, they sought so to raise the standards and improve the methods of chemists that a chemically demonstrated fact should stand unassailable. They had studied under pupils Of the men who saw chemistry evolve from alchemy. Some of them lived to follow with admiration the brilliant achievements of such men as Gibbs, van 't Hoff and Arrhenius, which are today establishing the fundamental principles of biochem istry on which agricultural practice rests.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.