126 TRANSACTIONS OF STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



accordance with these results and are attaining more satisfactory returns 

 for their labor and investment. Popular understanding of principles 

 underlying agricultural practice has been wonderfully advanced, and 

 has led to hardly less wonderful improvement in the practice. Every 

 line of farm work has been modified and advanced directly or indirectly 

 through the various agencies for agricultural education. 



The statistics of attendance at the various agricultural colleges of the 

 country show an increase in the number of students of thirty-three per 

 cent during the last decade. The instruction afforded has improved in 

 even more striking measure. The conception of what instruction may 

 be expected to do and the methods by which it is to proceed have been 

 greatly clarified by experience. The relations of theory and practice 

 have become more clearly discerned. Scientific investigator and prac- 

 tical operator have been drawn closer together and have acquired 

 respect for each other. The result is confidence, mutual interest, 

 progress. In the early days of agricultural education there was some 

 charlatanry afloat. The practical man could not, however, be long 

 imposed upon by mere pedantic devices, for the work of the agricultural 

 teacher comes quickly to its testing at the hands of hard facts. One 

 seldom hears from farmers of to-day the sneering depreciation of scien- 

 tific work which was all too common and perhaps to some extent 

 deserved a decade or two ago. The main reason is that the sciences 

 involved have learned how to apply themselves, have found how to 

 hook themselves into the needs of actual life. 



Nothing is more encouraging in the whole field of agricultural educa- 

 tion than the success of various devices which have been evolved for 

 the dissemination of scientific information. "We may fairly summarize 

 them all under the head of University Extension. The agricultural 

 experiment stations of the United States published, in 1899, 455 reports 

 and bulletins, aggregating 16,954 pages of the most carefully prepared 

 information on agricultural subjects. These publications were regularly 

 mailed to 523,970 readers. The publications of the United States Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture, which has recently become the greatest single 

 agency for the ascertainment and dissemination of agricultural knowl- 

 edge in the world, are not included in the foregoing. This Department 

 alone published, in 1900, 468 separate publications, aggregating 7,152,- 

 428 copies, an increase of 300 per cent since 1893. It is a notable fact 

 that while these huge masses of high-class agricultural information are 

 being cast abroad throughout the country the publication of agricul- 

 tural periodicals and books by private enterprise has also advanced. 

 Literature of this sort is of a much higher order and is much more 

 liberally patronized than ever before. 



The Farmers' Institutes have developed into a solid institution of 

 great value also for the spreading of information and for bringing the 



