206 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



scientific experiments and sound advice, all the money you have contributed 

 for its support, with compound interest added. Let us then, one and all, 

 encourage its professors to continue in their good work, and ask them to meet 

 us at our yearly institutes and exhibit for our benefit the garnered fruits of 

 each year's labor. 



Let us do one thing more, and insist that the Legislature shall so increase 

 the accommodations of the college, that our daughters shall share on equal 

 terms the benefits of its institution. "We will not ask that they shall be taught 

 to hold the plow, or handle the hoe or the scythe, or to drive the reaper or the 

 mower, or to do any of the coarser work of the farm; but they may learn to 

 do it all if they choose; and much of it, with the improved machinery of the 

 day, they can do as well as men. But let them be taught practical horticulture 

 and floriculture and bee-keeping and butter making, and we shall soon see this 

 education asserting itself in the improvement of the farmer's garden, the 

 adornment of his home, and the opening up of new and profitable industries 

 for women. There is not a village in the State of three thousand inhabitants 

 that does not offer a fair support to a practical florist. Add to this bee-keep- 

 ing and you have an industry in which any lady, with proper education, can 

 engage with almost absolute assurance of success. These are industries in 

 which women can compete with men without any compromise of womanly 

 modesty or dignity, and without any loss of womanly attractiveness. 



But over and above all these and of vastly more importance to both women 

 and to men, stands the fine art of cookery; and I insist that there shall be a 

 kitchen department added to the agricultural college, where this fine art shall 

 be taught ; and let us all unite in one determined effort to rescue this art from 

 the Biddies and Bridgets of to-day, and elevate it to its proper place among 

 the accomplishments of our daughters. It will add much to the interest of 

 the young man who is learning how to raise nice beefsteak to know that his 

 girl is, at the same time, learning how to cook it, for to that ordeal it must 

 come at last ; and if spoiled in cooking, it has been raised and slaughtered in 

 vain. It is as true to-day as ever, that we must all eat to live. Tanner may 

 find weak imitators now and then, but he will hardly succeed in making fast- 

 ing popular ; and so the real test of good husbandry is when its products are 

 brought to the table; and what does it profit a man to raise good wheat and 

 get poor bread, to raise fat beef and eat beefsteak fried in lard, or to raise 

 good peas and have them spoiled in making poor, very poor coffee? So let us 

 have the kitchen department with its professor; not one of these with us 

 to-night, but a bright, neatly attired, and thoroughly informed educated lady 

 to preside over it. 



And let the lessons in cooking be made to include the art of buying or 

 selecting. For, disguise it as we will, when we get fairly settled down to the 

 everyday duties of life, the marketing falls to the lot of the wife. And how 

 ^hall she know how to select, what and how much to bu}', and what to pay, 

 unless she has been taught. And though in this respect there is less responsi- 

 bility for the farmer's wife than for the mechanic's or the wife of the profes- 

 sional man, yet they all need just this accomplishment ; and the time is coming 

 when no woman will be regarded as thoroughly educated who does not possess 

 this accomplishment. Here in Michigan to-day we are raising the finest beef, 

 mutton, pork, and poultry in the world, and the best cereals and the finest 

 vegetables; and yet one-half of all that is consumed at home is spoiled in 

 cooking — nay, more than that; much of it is spoiled before it is brought to 

 the kitchen, for the want of the proper knowledge of how to preserve it. And 



