100 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



It is fifteen years since the Massachusetts State Hoard of Agricult- 

 ure asked the Legislature for the passage of an Act authorizing, as 

 the first >tep in furnishing an agricultural education to the people — 



First — The engrafting upon her common school education the 

 study of elementary geology, animal and vegetable physiology, and 

 botany; to be taught in the usual form, by manuals, with suitable 

 illustrations, simple and inexpensive; so prepared that it will not 

 altogether depend upon the knowledge of the instructor-to make them 

 of use to the learner. With a slight change in their studies, our 

 children would learn something which would every day become 

 more deeply implanted in their minds by what they see going on 

 around them. "These studies." they said, "cannot be commenced 

 too early, for they are the germs of all future development, the vital- 

 ity of which is never lost : they must be planted early, if it is hoped 

 to reach a full harvest." 



Second — They asked for an agricultural school with a farm attached 

 to it, where the practice of agriculture in it- several departments, 

 and the best methods of farm management, could be practically 

 learned. The committee, among whom I find the names Marshal P. 

 Wilder and George B. Loring, said: "If a person, who had the abil- 

 ity to perform whatever he undertook, should offer the people of this 

 commonwealth a secret, by which in twenty years the productive 

 value of the lands throughout the whole State would be doubled, 

 what would that secret be worth? The diffusion of general agricult- 

 ural education would accomplish that object; nay. go far beyond it, 

 in less time than has been named, and at an expense that would be 

 trifling in proportion to the benefits that would flow from it."' 



Other States have taken similar action. The farmers of the West 

 have recommended a revision of the school course with this object 

 in view. 



In Illinois, an able defender of industrial education said: " We 

 take the child out of God's natural industrial university and send 

 him to school, where, at best, only a fraction of his entire manhood 

 can be properly developed; and, after all, we do not fit pupils for 

 actual life, even in those elemental studies, after forty weeks' school 

 per annum, as well as they were fitted in ten weeks, half a century 

 ago. One prime cause of this is, that the book-makers and publish- 

 ers have assumed about as absolute control of our public schools as 

 the politicians have of our post-offices. Rich publishing houses have 

 offered as high as seventy thousand dollars for the introduction of a 

 single text-book into a State. And yet not one of those books teach 

 as the things which it is our chief interest to know, and our pro- 

 tracted school drill leaves little time for anything else." 



' : I wish," says Professor Turner, "to make room for some of the 

 subjects which underlie the industrial arts — botany, entomology, and 

 zoology, for instance. The State of Illinois spends, say. twelve mill- 

 ion dollars a year on her public schools, and loses from ten to 

 twenty million dollars from obnoxious insects. Now. I would have 

 every one of these insects, about a hundred in all, with pins in their 

 backs, put up in a show case in every public school in the State; and 

 I would have every child know them as well as he knows his father's 

 cows and horses; instead of having one or two lone men looking 

 alter them. I would turn millions of intelligent young eyes upon 

 them, and thusprepare for their extermination. 1 would have this, 



