In
the mid-nineteenth century, agricultural chemists studying at
Yale strove to reform agriculture in New England. At the center
of their efforts lay the new principles of organic chemistry that
they had imbibed first from their American teachers, such as Benjamin
Silliman, and later from their training abroad with several leading
agricultural chemists. This training taught the American students
to see and investigate nature as a circulation of matter passing
through the soil, plants, and animals and back again into the
soil. In the 1830s and 1840s, John Pitkin Norton developed this
holistic vision of the "cycle of life" into a program
of scientific agriculture that he promoted across New England
and taught to his students at Yale University’s Sheffield
Scientific School. One student, William Henry Brewer continued
this tradition from the 1850s to the early twentieth century,
training numerous students in agricultural chemistry, forestry
and bacteriology. |