SECRETARY'S REPORT. 33_ 



found. In our changeable climate, confining a young man within 

 the walls of a school-room for any length of time, almost invariably 

 enervates his system, and he loaths the sight of agricultural labor. 

 Germans may sit in their chairs and smoke eighteen out of twenty- 

 four hours and grow corpulent by the process ; but in this country 

 it is entirely different. 



In accordance with the spirit of our institutions, education should 

 be general, as well as particular. A few men should in every pro- 

 fession have a special education for some special department. Every 

 community needs at least one skillful surgeon^ though it have many 

 good physicians. So we need a few men in our country who are 

 pre-eminent as chemists or as veterinary surgeons, or mathemati- 

 cians, but to make every body a chemist or mathematician is one 

 of those Utopian ideas that will never be realized. Your close 

 book student is apt to become the abstract thinker, but poorly 

 fitted for physical labor. Young men too will repair to some 

 institution and attend to the study of chemistry, and the fond father 

 hopes to have his son with him on his farm. But the boy has seen 

 an opening somewhere else, and he enters it, leaving his father to 

 plod along the same old way. The chairman of your committee 

 has had some experience on this point sufficient to substantiate his 

 position. He could enumerate several hundred young men who 

 have attended to the study of chemistry, and many of them agri- 

 cultural chemistry and mineralogy ; but he can refer to only two of 

 that whole number who have become practical farmers. I^ot that 

 their education would be lost to them or the community, but it is 

 diverted from its original design. 



We must then, come to the conclusion, that under the present 

 influences bearing upon us, it will not be the best policy to pursue, 

 to establish agricultural schools with the expectation of directly 

 educating the farmer. 



It must be borne in mind, that we have in Maine, at least one 

 hundred thousand persons engaged in agricultural labor. To edu- 

 cate so large a number must be a work of time, and whatever mode 

 may be adopted, must be, as much as possible, adapted to the great 

 mass of farmers. 



The question then arises, how shall the fiirmer be better educated ? 

 Here is a broad field of inquiry, and your committee believe it can 

 to a certain extent be answered, 



