Choice of pursuits, or, What to do, and why, describing seventy-five trades and professions, and the talents and temperaments required for each; also, how to educate, on phrenological principles, each man for his proper work : together with portraits and biographies of more than one hundred successful thinkers and workers / by Nelson Sizer.
- Sizer, Nelson, 1812-1897.
- Date:
- 1890 [1889]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Choice of pursuits, or, What to do, and why, describing seventy-five trades and professions, and the talents and temperaments required for each; also, how to educate, on phrenological principles, each man for his proper work : together with portraits and biographies of more than one hundred successful thinkers and workers / by Nelson Sizer. Source: Wellcome Collection.
43/750 (page 25)
![competition. The world knows the difference between good and bad work when it relates to the construction of a chair, a boot, or a bureau, but has not yet so far advanced as to be able to determine, in general, the difference between good and bad farming. Indeed, there is so little of good farming, that we have nothing real I j with which to contrast poor work in that line; and so long as every man wlio has culture and aspires to bo respected entertains the untruthful opinion that to be a tiller of the soil is to be merely a drudge, and a disrepu- table one at that, so long the best talent and culture will seek other vocations. The sharp attritions and competi- tions of rivalry serve to urge manulactures foi ward toward perfection much more i‘a])idly than any influences now operating tend to push forward and perfect agriculture. Agricultural publications are working in the right direc- tion ; still, there is a sneer on nine-tenths of the faces of the farmers against “ BOOK FARMING,” and this sneer is partly merited, because fanciful, unbbo- rious gentlemen, with chemistry and vegetable physiology in their heads, and very little practical experience, have undertaken to carry on farming by the book with kid gloves on, and of course made everything cost more than it would sell for. But this is no argument. The sturdy son of the soil should have a sturdy, common-sense edu- cation, and then he can elevate his pursuit. The mechanic is forced by competition to educate himself in his business, to bring all the appliances of science to the perfection and development of his work. 2](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b28081481_0045.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
