56 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



Professor Agassiz. I have been an advocate of the combina- 

 tion of the higher institutions of learning, whatever their char- 

 acter, because I believe it brings together a larger number of 

 men who are endowed with higher powers, and that is for the 

 good of those institutions ; but I wish not to be understood as 

 carrying these ideas of concentration to the lower schools. 

 Concentration has its great advantages in the higher schools, 

 because the number of capable teachers is not proportionate to 

 the desirableness of those institutions. I will quote an example. 

 The whole of Germany has not three persons equal to Liebig, 

 and yet Germany has thirty-two universities. Then there are 

 twenty-nine universities that have second-rate professors ; and 

 so it must be, necessarily, elsewhere. We have in the State of 

 Massachusetts five colleges. Can you expect to have five profes- 

 sors of chemistry equal to Liebig ? You cannot. Therefore it 

 would be desirable, for the sake of higher instruction, that we 

 had not so many colleges. That is my doctrine with reference 

 to the higher branches of education ; but when we come to 

 elementary education and high schools we have not got enough, 

 and those we have are too crowded, and in each of them the 

 teachers have too many pupils. There the teacher has to do 

 something more than merely give out what he knows, trusting 

 that his hearers will take as much of it as they are capable of 

 taking. He is actually to bring the young to understand how 

 to learn ; and to obtain that result the relation of the children 

 to the teacher must be somewhat that of the children in a house- 

 hold to father and mother. There must not be more than the 

 teacher can really educate ; and most of our schools have twice 

 as many scholars as can be properly taught by the teachers. I 

 believe that one of the causes of the want of real and rapid 

 progress in conformity with the demands of the age in our 

 elementary schools arises from the fact that they arc too few, 

 that in each of them there are too many scholars, and that there 

 are too few teachers. 



Dr. Loring. I have occupied a good deal of the time of this 

 meeting to-day, but on the matter of teachers I desire to say one 

 word more. It seems to me we have allowed our minds to be 

 led away a little this afternoon into those difficult questions 

 which have somewhat agitated the State with regard to the 

 location of the college, and which have disturbed the trustees of 



