188 ANNUAL REPORT. OF THE Off. Doc. 



Now, there are degrees of education, and here in this College, as 

 many others, we have begun down at the foundation. We have to 

 get our roots, so to speak, struck into the soil, then we have to build 

 up gradually and rear the superstructure on them, and the relation 

 of one to the other is one of the important practical problems we 

 have to meet all the while. 



I conceive of a system of real education as very much under the 

 figure of a tree. A tree strikes its roots into the soil and the more 

 vigorous the roots are under ground, the more healthy they are, the 

 better they support and nourish the whole growth of the tree; then 

 those roots are all compacted, if 3'ou give the tree a fair chance, and 

 those roots and rootlets contribute their force to produce one solid 

 trunk, and that solid trunk gives your branches^ your flowers, your 

 blossoms and your fruit. Just so in education. There must be some- 

 where, down in the foundation of education, a rooting in the soil of 

 elementary knowledge and then there must be somewhere a gather- 

 ing up of that knowledge. That is the oflQce of the college; to gather 

 all that up into strong, compact, vigorous growth that we call the 

 trunk of the tree. A college education is the trunk of education. 

 Any system of education, high or low, under any guise whatever, 

 which does not somehow provide for the systematic compacting of 

 elementary knowledge, is a false system and never will produce 

 strong and permanent results. The inference is obvious, that in 

 agricultural education, therefore, we ought to have it in the public 

 schools and we ought to have in the teaching ranks in our schools a 

 corps of teachers capable of teaching the sciences of nature. 



I spent my early life on a farm and I never was taught that there 

 was any such thing as a law of life in the growth of plants, trees and 

 flowers about me. I dealt with animals all my life and I never was 

 taught that there was the slightest suggestion of any such thing as 

 a law of animal growth^ so with all that world open to me I never 

 had a suggestion that I was a part of that world. Everything was 

 done by the mere rule of three for the ordinary purposes of getting 

 a living. You need not wonder that the average boy and girl under 

 such conditions becomes dissatisfied with that kind of a life and 

 wants to drop out of it. But if you once open to them the mysteries 

 of the life about them and let them see that they, of all others, are 

 the most favored with opportunities for learning in the life all 

 around them, you make a new attraction for the life of the farm. I 

 hope we shall be able to contribute a very large amount of education 

 to that end during this session, as supplementing the work in the 

 public schools. 



We have not been able, heretofore, to do anything like it in this 

 field what we have desired to do, what I hope we shall be able to do 

 hereafter, but we have made a beginning, at least, after an eight 



