I find this line very interesting. It is stated that reading can improve your morals and faculties; while the latter is obviously true, the idea that reading can improve your morals is debatable. Reading more does not make someone a better person. Reading can make you more open to other ideas, which can be a very good thing, but this implies that reading can improve your morals, which is an odd statement. I wonder what books they would have considered to improve morals, and what books didn't make the cut. Actually, even more so, I wonder what kind of "morals" were being striven for.

I find it very interesting that in this context, chemistry is only used to comprehend the theory of agriculture. It seems odd that, even though chemistry has so much more to offer and explore (such as Dalton's atomic theory in the beginning of the 1800s), Agriculture is the only thing mentioned. This was a time when there was so much about to be discovered but that seems to not be acknowledged even if UVA was to be a great place of education.