40 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



pass ail exaniinatiou and receive a marking number — a rank. Dr. Beal, 

 whose experience has been of great value in the counsels of the College, has 

 often enforced this or a similar plan. 



To carry out such a plan would require a larger force of overseers than the 

 deiiartments have ever been able to command. Practice, to be most valuable, 

 should be under skilled oversight, but it is impossible for one professor and 

 one foreman to take immediate oversight of more than a small fraction of the 

 work daily, and necessarily scattered over the departments. Novices in any 

 Avork give imperfection in the products, and it would hardly be tolerated in 

 the College that it should manifest everywhere that all its work was done by 

 mere learners, so that we are obliged in some degree to compromise between 

 the call for model work on the farm, and the call for work that shall afford 

 practice to beginners. The work performed by students ought to be fairly 

 well done, else the constant sight of imperfections will uneducate, or rather 

 diseducate faster than the practice will educate. 



Again, students in this College value the work system as affording them the 

 means of paying in jnirt their own way. Many students could not remain at 

 the College but for this means of lightening their expenses; but mere prac- 

 tice under the eye of a skilled foreman is rarely the kind of real work, hard, 

 genuine work, for which the College can afford to pay. 



Dr. Beal's plan is again worthy of consideration — to require work regu- 

 larly, on stated afternoons, which shall be educational, and performed with- 

 out compensation. The problem how with students' labor to make the oper- 

 ations on farm and garden excellent of their kind, so as to serve for models; 

 how to make students' labor worth to the institution what it costs in wages; 

 and how to make it a highly educational practice, in which students may 

 begin bunglers and end possessed of skill is something like the famous me- 

 chanical problem of the three round bodies, a hard one. 



I have been grieved at some speeches and reports coming from men of other 

 states, which assumed that the JMichigan Agricultural College "put on airs" 

 because of its labor system, and thought every other institution ought to fol- 

 low its example. There is no such feeling here, I am sure. If Yale, with no 

 farm, .can make graduates like her own professors — the Johnsons, or Liebigs, 

 promoters of agricultural science, we, with our farmer graduates, will gladly 

 acknowledge the superior value of her work. Happy, indeed, are the college 

 officers who are free from the bother of students' labor and students' board; 

 but the State of Michigan desires to have the College return a good propor- 

 tion of its graduates to the farm. Several wise college officers in the East 

 and the West pronounce such an aim foolish. Nevertheless Michigan legisla- 

 tors, agricultural societies, granges wish it, and it seems to bo proved that the 

 labor system is essential to the accomplishment of this part of the duty of 

 the College. But even as regards the great work of making a science of agri- 

 culture, something may be said for a system of manual labor. Nearly all 

 inductive sciences had their growth througli the combined observations of 

 many and continuous observers. Agriculture needs such observers. Now an 

 army of such observers will be made by the colleges that combine manual 

 labor with study, and will be scattered widely throughout the land. The 

 ignorant are for the most part incompetent to the observing and recording of 

 the necessary facts, or to the trying and recording of the necessary experi- 

 ments. The education afforded the college graduate needs not be very pro- 

 found, nor very minute to make him capable of rendering great help in this 

 way. To practice while one studies, and to do both under competent iustruc- 



