Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/276

264 in England, have each, perhaps, given the world more of new truth than he. Stöckhardt's chief labor has been to teach, to popularize, to encourage, and thus to promote science, and, withal, to help in its application to practical life. In this great work of mediating between science and the people for whose benefit science is, among those who have done most for agriculture, no man, except, perhaps, Justus Liebig, excels Julius Stöckhardt.

An inkling of the spirit in which Stöckhardt's labors for agriculture has been performed he has himself given us, perhaps unwittingly, in the illustration on the cover of his journal, "Der chemische Ackersmann" ("The Chemical Husbandman"). In the center is a rural scene. In the foreground, cattle and sheep are feeding in the comfort of a peaceful autumn day. Farther away, a reaper is laying down his sickle by the waving grain to follow the heavy load that is trundling homeward from the field. In another field a plowman has left his plow in the furrow, while he and his tired horses are enjoying a brief period of rest. Close by him are the bags of guano and bone dust to replace the precious ingredients of plant-food that have been carried away with the harvest. Beyond is the little village, with its steep-roofed cottages, and the village church surrounded by shade trees and surmounted by the tower whose bell calls the inhabitants to morning work, to vesper rest, and to Sabbath worship. Directly in front the ground has been cut away, and reveals, in the deep recesses toward which the roots of trees and herbs are seen to penetrate, a strange laboratory where imps and kobolds are busy with furnace and crucible, retort and mortar, test-tube and balance, as it were, working over the materials and concocting the compounds that are to be gathered up by the plants, and make the fruit to reward the tiller of the soil. Between this occult laboratory and the farm-work that is going on above are the words "Praxis mit Wissenschaft" ("Practice with science"). But this scene and motto are not all of the picture, nor do they typify the whole of the spirit of Stöckhardt's life and work. Above are clouds with sunbeams streaming brightly through them upon the earth below, and on them is written, "An Gottes Segen ist Alles gelegen" ("On God's blessing all depends").