500 FARMERS' INSTITUTES. 



small specific Jobs like making bolts or pin heads. They could not teach 

 them to be skilled, general mechanics. They had no means of teaching 

 mechanical drawing. They said: "We have no apprentice system and 

 when a boy does get some skill we can't keep him. Our foremen are all 

 foreigners who have had foreign apprenticeships." In one shop they told 

 me of a graduate of the Mechanical Department of Cornell University 

 who had offered himself as a foreman but who had not learned and scorned 

 the actual operations of the shops. 



So, with what I knew of the Agricultural College, I said: '' Suppose we 

 take your boys and teach them drafting and all the foundation theory, and 

 with that, have them work a couple of hours each day in the shop, at the 

 bench or forge. Suppose we make them competent bosses and don't give 

 them the big head." Then they said: " All right, go ahead and we'll send 

 you our boys." Now, in this idea of combining labor with study, practice 

 with theory; doing with learning hmo to do, is the key to the value of the 

 college, and too, that is the reason why it will not realize its best possibilities 

 in connection with a university. The gymnasia and athletics of other col- 

 leges do not make up for the advantages of this regular daily physical exercise, 

 even as a health insurance, and they miss wholly the grand advantage of ally- 

 ing in a noble partnership the laboratory of the student with the life and 

 action of the future man. 



At our Agricultural College we have preserved intact the labor system. I 

 am free to confess that I did not at first believe in it, but I am thoroughly 

 converted. 



I found at the university that along in May and June the students were 

 pale and looked fagged out. It is called the result of over study. Nonsense T 

 it is from lack of exercise. Gymnasia are not the thing needed. They have 

 done more harm than good in multitudes of cases. Many a boy owes a 

 serious illness to his athletics. But this combination of good, honest, manly 

 labor with study, works no such ill effects. 



You don't find our boys sick because of the two hours' work. It does them 

 good. They eat more than the students of most colleges. Their digestion 

 is better. They are developing the whole man, and meanwhile they are pre- 

 serving their respect for labor and familiarity with it. 



PLEUEO PNEUMONIA. 



You know the pleuro pneumonia. A year or so ago a gentleman imported 

 to Ohio some fine Jerseys and one of them he sold into a herd in Illinois, and 

 the first thing they knew their cattle began to die and some one said it was 

 pleuro pneumonia. But who could tell? Who knew it except students of 

 veterinary? They proved it and traced out all the exposed animals and con- 

 demned and slaughtered them. The only way to meet such an emergency 

 is to have trained and educated men who can recognize the disease or other 

 cause of trouble. 



EXPERIMENTS. 



I wish to say a word or two as to our hopes in the matter of the Hatch 

 bill now before Congress. Our main foundation now is the land grant of 

 1862, of which the main purpose was educational, not experimental, so that 

 most of our abilities go in that direction, but since the passage of that act 



