444 Bureau of Farmers' Institutes. 



us who witness the hard and sometimes unequal struggle of the 

 farmer with his environment are convinced that the schoolhouse 

 should be to him and to his successors not only a refinement but 

 a utility. Beside accomplishing other desired ends, it should, so 

 far as possible, train the powers of observation and furnish fun- 

 damental knowledge of a special kind. 



But without dwelling longer upon this proposition at this point, 

 let us clear the ground for further discussion by reviewing the 

 conditions under which the agriculturist of to-day is carrying on 

 his work, conditions which stand in sharp contrast with those 

 prevailing when this old century was young. In the first place 

 the farmer is asked to consider an agricultural creed based upon 

 the facts of science. He is admonished on every hand that to 

 doubt and defy this creed will bring on him the retribution 

 thajt falls to the lot of unprogressive men. He has presented to 

 him a philosophy of farm practice of which the alpha and the 

 omega are the deductions of the laboratory as to the sources of 

 fertility and the avenues of waste, as to balanced rations and 

 unbalanced, as to plant and insect pests, and as to the whole 

 round of means and methods. If he takes up his family paper, 

 that curious compound of accurate and inaccurate information 

 in agriculture, domestic science, politics^ and religion, he is con- 

 fronted by scientific terms, extracts from station bulletins, articles 

 from the pen of pseudo scientists who wrestle blindly but reso- 

 lutely with the limitations of a little dangerous knowledge, dis- 

 cussions of new fertilizers and feeding stuffs, and spraying liquids, 

 in fact the farmer holds in his hands a modern newspaper, the 

 product of modern conditions. 



If the potato-grower steps into the market-place he is con- 

 fronted by at least twenty best potato fertilizers, each with a 

 formidable statement of composition. The dairyman finds in 

 the same place bags of commercial feeding stuffs with so much 

 protein and so much fat marked on them as required, by law. 

 The market gardener and fruitgrower have their attention called 

 to fungicides and insecticides and numerous forms of apparatus 

 for applying these. In the winter the farmer attends, or should 

 attend, the farmers' institute where he hears for the most part 

 sound., common-sense, doctrines clothed in a semi-scientific garb 

 with an occasional lapse, by way of contrast, from both common- 

 sense and science. When the rural delivery postman stops at 

 the door he leaves the station bulletin on the pages of which is 



