26 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



premises and implements, breeds of domestic animals, their characteristics and 

 adaptations, the feeding of animals, marketing, farm accounts, farm law, etc. 

 Theoretical instruction is supplemented, illustrated and enforced by the actual 

 working of a farm of 600 acres, with improved buildiugs, implements, and the 

 various breeds of stock. 



It is the purpose of the board of agriculture to have the farm managed in 

 accordance with the best methods; to emphasize the value of order and system 

 in all farm operations by example; to furnish a certain quota of students labor, 

 10 to 15 hours each week; to give all students who desire, and make the riglit use 

 of their opportunities, some knowledge and skill in most of the details, the 

 fundamentals of farm practice. 



As far as time and means will permit a portion will be used for experimental 

 work, the testing of new grains and grasses, while the feeding of the different 

 breeds of animals will receive attention. 



THE BOTANICAL DEPARTMENT. 



The botanical laboratory and museum of vegetable products with the needed 

 rooms occupy the Avhole of a fine gothic building 40x06 feet, two stories high, 

 with a gallery above. The rooms contain many of the most recent and valuable 

 works on botany, a fine herbarium, including mosses and fungi; a collection of 

 seeds, grains, grasses, fruits and preparations ready for study ; the state ■ ol lec- 

 tion of forestry products shown at Philadel[)liia and Xew Orleans, for which 

 diplomas were given. The laboratory contains a large number of good com- 

 pound niiscroscopes with much useful accessory apparatus. 



With an arboretum of 200 specie-', a botanic garden of 700, green-houses con- 

 taining 1,000 species and varieties, the parks, gardens and orchards many more, 

 the botanical department is rarely at a loss for any kind of material for study 

 and illustration. 



In 1884: an en)incnt eastern professor of botany who had studied in Kurope 

 and visited the best laboratories, described their ap[)aratus which was no better 

 than that now used at this college. In a scientific journal he includes Michigan 

 Agricultural College among the list of four colleges which "had taken the in- 

 itiative in introducing needed reforms, and already a most promising crop of 

 fruit is the result." 



The botanical department by its testing of vegetable and grass seeds has 

 without doubt been largely instrumental in improving the (juality of those 

 offered in the markets; and the demonstration by a long and suc- 

 cessful line of experiments in crossing plants grown in one place with 

 those of the same variety raised in a distant locality, that the product is thereby 

 largely improved in quality and amount, has met the approval of scientists, and 

 scientific journals, and will in time be productive of substantial results whose 

 value cannot well be measured, while the future of the 175 kinds of grasses grown 

 in the grass plats of the botanical garden is of a promise that may well chal- 

 lenge competition in this country with its great variety of soils and climates. 

 It is with great pleasure that we note the fact that the botanical department of 

 the Agricultural College has placed itself in the front rank for scientific research, 

 for original investigation and in the facilities offered to students in its regular 

 course of one and one-half years. 



THE CHEMICAL DEPARTMENT. 



The chemical department with its laboratory of 18 rooms, a lecture room 



