nts,
and machines. They also employ land, chemicals, water, plants, and
animals. Their business, however, focuses on living things. No matter
how crude their attempts, or how uncertain their successes, those who
try to grow living things rank as agriculturalists.[1]

[Footnote 1: Of course, the definition excludes brewers, distillers,
biological supply houses, and others, such as zoo curators, who manage
living things. Agriculture takes place on a piece of land widely and
commonly known as a farm.]

For the most part, a museum cannot show the essential biological aspects
of agriculture. Agricultural production involves the farmer in the
course of nature in its seasons, and in the peculiar laws of living
things. In these respects, agriculture stands rather apart from
transportation, manufacturing, and artistic industries where the tools,
machines, and raw materials remain fairly inert as men work on them.
Machines move but do not live, and therein lies the major difference
between agriculture and the other arts. Farmers deal with plants and
animals but the museum can show only the things a farmer uses as he
accommodates to and regulates nature. Some of the objects, in
themselves, give a fair idea of how the farmer used them. Most people,
after all, know about edged blades and digging tools. Nearly anyone can
grasp what a man might do with a scythe or a plow. Even the working of a
modern reaper needs only a little explanation. But museums cannot well
show cross-breeding of plants and animals. Museums seldom can show the
results of that cross-breeding. Bags of fertilizer can be put on
display, as can vials of penicillin, and jars of herbicide. Although
some may find these interesting, such items show little in and of
themselves.

Unfortunately, the things that cannot be shown in any easily
intelligible way surpass in importance the items that can be shown. The
sheep shears, which anyone can understand, represent less to the farmer
than do the sheep. Sheep shears, no matter how sophisticated and no
matter how necessary, do not explain sheep husbandry. The shears tell
little about the wool industry, and nothing much about sheep breeds. And
so on through the list of agricultural enterprises.

Museums must collect and exhibit the tools, implements, and machines
which farmers use in their business. These items, however, seldom make
up the core of real agricultural activity. The catalog here presented
shows something of the