498 FAKMERS' INSTITUTES. 



ural colleges, viz., the study of the causes of these differences and the means 

 of preserving and reproducing the good points and of avoiding the bad ones. 



They are places for studying the how and the why of agricultural success 

 or failure. 



Thirty years ago our leading statesmen saw that widespread agricultural 

 failure threatened us, that whole sections of the country were becoming 

 gradually exhausted. 



Every nation startswith a soil in its pristine vigor, fresh from Nature's 

 hand. The first result of the footsteps of man is the blasting of that fertil- 

 ity. Large stretches of country have been abandoned to the wolf and the 

 rabbit. 



When in college I had a classmate whose family had just crossed from 

 Mississippi to Arkansas. They had formerly moved from Alabama and 

 before that from Greor|;ia. They left exhaustion in their pathway. 



I would rather have a "pine barren " farm than many of the formerly val- 

 uable farms of Virginia. You know after the war many Northern m^en went 

 down South and bought farms with fine buildings for almost nothing, but 

 they found they had paid too dear. The farms had no heart and would grow 

 nothing — five bushels of wheat per acre was an average yield — they wouldn't 

 take clover — they wouldn't even grow sheep! And Congress saw that the 

 same process was running its course in the North. New England was always 

 poor soil, but is now far more so than 100 years ago. You remember the 

 Genesee Valley and its seemingly exhaustless fertility? Where is it now? 



You remember the early accounts of the soil of Indiana and Illinois and 

 how it was said that these rich prairies coald never be exhausted, and how they 

 were cropped and cropped until the -corn crops dropped from 100 to 75 and 

 60 and 50 and 40 bushels per acre, and then the owners moved to Kansas, 

 and from Kansas they will have to move on yet farther west, and, unless 

 some better methods are learned and practiced, they will have to keep on 

 moving until the Pacific ocean calls a halt and gives them the alternative of 

 drowning, starvation, or reformation in methods of farming. 



Do you remeiuber the past wheat crops of Michigan? Twenty-five bushels 

 of wheat to the acre. Then do you remember how you ran down to 30, 15 and 

 12 bushels per acre? Then you woke up to the situation and began to use 

 science in your farming, and the tide was turned, and the product per acre 

 is consequently on the up grade again. 



Now the man who says that science is useless to agriculture is behind his 

 times. He does not read the papers. But we have other problems before us 

 at the Agricultural College beside the question of exhaustion of soils or 

 rather the jDrevention of the exhaustion of soils. 



We have it laid upon us by the laws of the State and of Congress, upon 

 which our endowment depends, to work out the theory and practice of 

 industrial education. Why called industrial? What is an education? It is a 

 drawing out. What, then, is an industrial drawing out? 



Our general and most familiar ideas of education have come to us from a 

 time when men thought that the mind was everything, the body nothing. 

 Hence came the idea of mortifying the flesh to advance the mind. I don't 

 depreciate the grandeur of man's mind, but it is a misconception that it is 

 necessary to suppress the body in order to develop the mind. We have 

 learned that we develop the mind best by caring well for the body, keeping it 

 in strong and vigorous trim. That man who has the best physique can 



