PROGRESS IN AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. 349 



Tlioro is also a fjood library and reading room, with current news- 

 papers and magazines. 



The expense of running the school in 1008—4 was $9,588, including 

 $4,430 for teachers' salaries and $5,158 for buildings, grounds, and 

 incidentals. This was a year when considerable sums were spent for 

 furniture, apparatus, supplies, and additional land. The running 

 expenses for the first six months in 11)05 were $;3,775. Five teachers 

 have been employed, but this year there were six. 



Previous to this year the Norton County High School has offered 

 college preparatory, normal, business, and general science courses, 

 but no courses related in any direct way to the leading industry of 

 the county — farming. The county superintendent of schools said 

 that his attention had been forcibly directed to this lack in the cur- 

 riculum of the high school by the experience of a young man who 

 came to the school from one of the many large farms in the vicinity, 

 took the four-year business course, spent one year in a local bank at 

 $30 a month, and then concluded that he would gain in both purse 

 and pleasure b}^ going back to the farm. Such a young man, and 

 there are many like him in the Norton County High School, would 

 have welcomed an agricultural course and would have gone back to 

 the farm much better prepared for the duties of life than he was with 

 a business training. So the county superintendent of schools and the 

 other members of the board of trustees decided that an agricultural 

 course should take the place of the general science course and hired 

 a graduate of the Kansas State Agricultural College to teach agri- 

 culture and other sciences in the high school. The Secretary of 

 Agriculture, who was then making a trip through the "' short-grass 

 country," became interested in the enterprise and sent a representa- 

 tive of this Office to Norton to help work up an interest in the agri- 

 cultural course and to aid in outlining the work. The president of the 

 Kansas State Agricultural College also responded to a call for assist- 

 ance and made one of a party of four that toured the county for eight 

 days in the interests of the new course of study. As a result consid- 

 erable interest was aroused in the proposed new work, a tentative 

 agricultural course was outlined, and arrangements were made with 

 the three farm implement dealers of the town to open their ware- 

 houses to the classes in agriculture and furnish experts to give in- 

 struction on the mechanics, care, and use of farm nuichinery. 



The agricultural work of the course will include botany, with 

 special reference to variation, development of species, hybridization, 

 and the influence of light, heat, moisture, etc., on the plant; soils 

 and tillage; plant physiology, farm crops, grain judging, and horti- 

 culture; farm accounts; farm management, including farm i)lans, 

 methods of cropping, farm macliineiy and its care, and rural ei'onom- 

 ics with special reference to the problems of a business nature that will 



