254 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



WHAT SHOULD BE THE QUALIFICATIONS OF THE STATE 



LECTURERS. 



BY A. h. Martin, Director of Institutes. 



Gentlemen of the Farmers' Institute, Managers, Lecturers and 

 Friends: Our good Chairman has just slightly misapplied the topic 

 assigned to me. That is the subject of Brother Glover's address, 

 and it is very much more pleasant to have the other fellow explain 

 the qualification^, of an Institute Lecturer. 



The few words I have to offer at this time might be summarized 

 by saying that the Department of Agriculture has taken no back- 

 ward .«iteps in the last decade. If I conlrl place before you on canvas 

 the agriculture of ten years ago, and that of today, the stages of 

 advancement would be very clear. Then the soil was regarded as 

 dead, inert matter; now it it known to be an active, a living reality, 

 subject to changes in organism, due to our treatment of it, and re- 

 sponding with increased production to intelligent care. We have 

 also the improvement in other lines of agriculture, the dairy cow. 

 Then the scrub cow was practically the only thing known to the 

 farmer; today we have the fine-bred dairy cow, with her physical 

 system developed for special purposes, and selected for her pro- 

 ductive capacity, gradually evolved by the brain power applied to 

 the theory of selection, as developed in the last ten or twelve years. 

 The same rule applies to poultry keeping. Note the pure bred stock 

 of today, selected in like manner with reference to the profit to be 

 derived therefrom, and with the laws of breeding and selection 

 worked down to a nicety and followed out. What a difference be- 

 tween this and the poultry keeping of ten or twelve years ago, before 

 the Department of Agriculture began its aggressive campaign by 

 the organized Farmers' Institutes! Again, one of Pennsylvania's 

 great interests, horticulture. Yesterday we heard Dr. Funk tell 

 us how climatic influences and all the enemies that beset the grower 

 of peaches, can be overcome so as to produce even in an off year — but 

 we know no more oft" years, thanks to the advancement in this line — 

 we now have a full crop of peaches, where, under the old regime the 

 peach trees were often destroyed altogether by unseasonable 

 weather. 



All this advancement, and many others along these lines, has 

 been worked out on these fine old farms of Pennsylvania, largely 

 through the instrumentality of the Farmers' Institute of Pennsyl- 

 vania. Every farmer, every delegate, here knows this to be true. 

 Other agencies and instrumentalities, which have given important 

 assistance in improving agricultural conditions in Pennsylvania, are 

 the Pennsylvania State Board of Agriculture, and the agricultural 

 papers and the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania are all doing 

 a great work, and are a power for good in the cause of agriculture, 

 using their influence and experiments to induce the people to adopt 



