58 ANNUAL REPORT OF NEW- YORK 



is hoped and confidently believed that from the public spirit and 

 well directed efforts of its present and its succeeding members, 

 the future of the Society will fully sustain its past, and that 

 public expectation, high as it may be entertained, will be 

 fully met. 



To do what has been done, and to accomplish what has been 

 accomplished, has not satisfied all the wishes of the members of 

 the Society and its friends. They were early impressed with the 

 conviction that to cultivate the soil as it should be cultivated, to 

 improve the soil and to improve the farm stock as they should 

 be improved, and to raise the farmer in his social relations and 

 in his intellectual capacity to a standard to which he is entitled, 

 and to that public position where the best interests of the State would 

 place him, he should be better taught, and better means of 

 giving him instruction should be provided than are now within 

 his reach. 



As some successful steps have been taken towards the accom- 

 plishment of so desirable an object, I will take the liberty, at 

 the risk of being thought a little tedious in detail, to state w^hat 

 has been done, and some of the difficulties that have been encoun- 

 tered by those attempting it. It may not be amiss to state that 

 whatever has been done, and by whomsoever done, has been a 

 gratuity. Judge Buel, in his lifetime, in the columns of The Cul- 

 tivator^ repeatedly urged the necessity for providing a school con- 

 nected with an experimental farm for the education of our farmers' 

 sons. The former Surveyor General, Simeon De Witt, wrote a 

 very able paper upon the subject, which was published in pam- 

 phlet form in 1819, in which he presented the advantages to be 

 derived from such an institution, with great force. 



This Society, for several years in succession, passed resolutions 

 recommending, in general terms, to the Legislature to provide 

 for such a school. In 1849, the present Executive of the State, 

 then President of the Society, in obedience to a resolution passed 

 by it, appointed a committee to present a memorial to the Legis- 

 lature, asking an act to establish an Agricultural School, and for 

 an appropriation for the purpose. The committee presented the 

 memorial, setting forth its necessity, and the advantages to be 

 expected from it; and they also gave the outlines of a plan and 

 a course of studies to be pursued. The Legislature printed the 



