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 State Agricultural Society. 423 



composition and quality of soils, special plant culture, meadow culture, 

 grape, hop, and tobacco culture, fruit culture, vegetable culture, breeding 

 of domestic animals in general, horses, cattle, sheep and smaller animals, 

 silkworm culture, bee culture, dairying, and practical farm business. 

 Parallel with this practical instruction, there is carried along through 

 the course of study arithmetic and algebra, bobk-keeping, a knowledge 

 of the laws and principles of taxation, physics, general and agricultural 

 chemistry, geology, vegetable physiology and zoology, veterinary sci- 

 ence, and study of forest trees and their uses. There you will find in 

 the highest departments sons of the gentry, fitting themselves for the 

 general management of estates; ambitious young men from the middle 

 classes, fitting themselves for stewards; and lower down, the sons of 

 peasants, between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, who wish to be- 

 come familiar with the routine of farm work, and who spend three or 

 four hours in study and the rest in actual labor. Any one can have 

 instruction in the special subjects taught. Besides, there is a course of 

 three weeks of public school va^tion, in which common school teachers 

 are posted up in the general principles of agriculture— an example 

 worthy of imitation. 



WHAT EUROPEAN GOVERNMENTS ARE DOING. 



Nor is tins all that those Governments are doing for this branch of 

 industry. Scattered arouud in various neighborhoods are what are 

 called experimental stations, where twelve to twenty acres are divided 

 into small sections for experiments in fertilizers, rotation of crops, with 

 a chemical laboratory and professor attached, and accommodations for 

 animals, that questions of breeding, feeding, and fattening may be set- 

 tled. These are nurseries for professors in the secondary schools, and 

 are supported by Government. Equally thorough and comprehensive 

 are tha. " building schools " of Prussia. At Holzminden, one of these 

 has live hundred pupils; and at Neinberg, in Hanoverian Prussians one 

 of the same grade for machinists and millwrights, masons, carpenters 

 and joiners, cabinet makers and locksmiths. France, before the war, # 

 had taken the lead in technical education. There was hardly a town 

 which had not its school of design; and even in Great Britain, from 

 ninety thousand to one hundred thousand pupils are annually receiving 

 this kind of instruction. 



But it is from Eussia, who has been making such immense advances 

 in developing all her resources, that Ave might draw the most striking 

 example for imitation. In eighteen hundred and fifty-six she founded the 

 Imperial Agricultural Institute at Gorigoritz, embracing primary, inter- 

 mediate, and superior departments. Then rapidly followed the creation of 

 numerous establishments for the production of silk, with departments for 

 instruction in the art; schools of horticulture, farm schools, model farms, 

 special schools for the culture of flax, all distributed with a liberality almost 

 profuse over the vast territory of the Empire, according to the nature 

 of the soil and climate, and the habits and needs of the people. Then 

 followed in quick succession the great agricultural museum at St. Peters- 

 burg, with numerous smaller ones in various parts of the country; schools 

 in Bessarabia, in Caucasia, and last of all, the great Acadenry of Agri- 

 culture and Forestry near Moscow, to which the Government makes an 

 annual appropriation of one hundred thousand dollars. In Caucasia the 

 tuition is not only made free, but small incomes are secured to meet the 

 expenses of students. At Tiflis they have a school for teaching the 



