TRANSACTIONS OF STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 127 



instructors in the colleges into personal contact with the farming popu- 

 lation and into observation of its conditions and needs. Not to be 

 underestimated, furthermore, is the influence of the extended corre- 

 spondence continually carried on by the agricultural schools with 

 individuals seeking specific information by letter. The department at 

 Berkeley answers in the course of a year five to six thousand such letters, 

 and many of them contain inquiries which demand special and often 

 prolonged research. A large share of the Director's own time and 

 strength is given to this correspondence. 



The work of agricultural education in its various agencies as we have 

 discussed them thus far may be summarized as follows: 



1. Investigation or research both in connection with the experiment 

 stations and at the laboratories in Berkeley, This addresses itself to 

 the solution of difficulties and the avoidance of dangers arising in the 

 agricultural practice of the State and to the discovery of new processes 

 and new applications, the testing of new materials, etc. 



2. The training of men capable of carrying on and extending this 

 work, capable of advancing the interests of scientific agriculture, capable 

 of aiding in the dissemination of knowledge. Such men may be termed 

 the leaders of progress. A community which lacks such cannot in these 

 days progress. It can only go backward. 



3. The contribution of the main elements of agricultural education to 

 the general education of students whose after-life is to be spent on 

 ranches or in farming communities. A very considerable portion of 

 our students are likely either to be farmers or to have interests in farm 

 property, and will find it of great advantage to take some portion of the 

 work offered in the College of Agriculture, even though not registered 

 exclusively as agricultural students. Over twenty per cent of all the 

 students now at Berkeley come from farmers' families. Only a small 

 part of the service rendered to education by the College of Agriculture 

 will be ultimately measured by the number actually registered for the 

 full course in Agriculture. 



4. The dissemination of information through Farmers' Institutes, 

 bulletins, correspondence, and short courses, and the solution of special 

 problems through tests, analyses, etc. 



There remains a field of education into which the University has not 

 yet entered, but into which in some form, either directly or indirectly, 

 it should be given the means to enter. I refer to the actual work of 

 experimental farming. For university students in agriculture it is by 

 no means essential that the actual manual processes of the farm work 

 should be taught as mere manual processes for the attainment of manual 

 skill, but it is highly desirable that these processes should be continually 

 open to observation and testing and that the opportunity for experi- 

 mentation in improved processes should be equally open. Particularly 



