LECTUEES AND ESSAYS READ AT INSTITUTES. 361 



farm. The proposition was received with evident surprise, and found no 

 favor. Why our people and our law-givers were so blind to our best and true 

 interest, I can give no rational explanation, unless it be our deep veneration for 

 the past, or, at that time, there was no institution for teaching the art and 

 science of agriculture in any of the States of this Union. 



" While our people and our government, both State and national, are truly 

 liberal and pour out their money like water in the establishment of literary 

 and other public institutions, and dot our land over with theological semina- 

 ries, with law seminaries, with medical seminaries, and with military semina- 

 ries, poor agriculture, whose hand sows the seed and whose arm gathers the 

 harvest on which all our earthly comforts, and even our very existence depend, 

 as yet has no seminary in which to teach her sons the most valuable of all arts." 



" I cannot consent to leave this branch of my subject without fortifying the 

 same with one or two authorities. Says an eloquent writer, " Where is the 

 man of so much apathy, as not to be cheered with the anticipation of behold- 

 ing such an institution, an extensive and handsome edifice, where our young 

 men shall be taught in theory and practice those immutable principles of 

 nature, which form the only infallible guide to all the substantial comforts of 

 life; when, by mingling the useful with the sweet, they will become inured 

 to the habits of industry ; when science and art shall combine to inspire them 

 with a laudable effort to excel each other? If we are charmed witli viewing a 

 garden on a small scale, the work, perhaps, of a single but skillful individual, 

 how infinitely more charming must be the view of three or four hundred acres, 

 planned and laid out with all the accumulated skill of ages, aided by all the 

 light which science has thrown upon the subject, with all the beauties of tlie 

 vegetable world, and all that is useful in the animal? Can any earthly pros- 

 pect be more beautiful? I answer yes; that of two or three hundred young 

 men vying with each other in skill and industry, not only in improving and 

 beautifying the establishment, but by improving their minds by study and 

 their bodies by manly labor, infinitely more pleasing and to their credit than 

 the mountebank feats of a gymnasium, thus fitting themselves as brilliant lights 

 to guide, instruct, and adorn the succeeding generation." 



From the time of its organization the Michigan State Agricultural Society 

 took the lead in the demand for an agricultural school. Some of its members, 

 no doubt, were educated men from the East. Journals of agriculture were 

 very few, but Sir Humphrey Davy, who began lecturing in England in 1801, 

 and Boussingault, in France, who began writing in 1844, and others, had 

 caused a new era to dawn upon agriculture. These men were aware of this, 

 and were anxious that agriculture should participate in the enormous 

 advantages that science was conferring upon mechanics and the simpler arts. 

 There were others, now well-to-do farmers, and men of influence, who had 

 hewn their farms out of the forests, and desired that their children should 

 possess the education which they lacked. They remembered the time when 

 the men of chief influence in Massachusetts and New York were farmers, and 

 felt that in the hurry of later times, in an age of machinery, of division of 

 labor, and the growth of cities, the farmers, as a class, were losing influence, 

 and they believed in education as the equalizer of the classes of society. The 

 influence of both these kinds of ideas and sentiments is plainly seen in the 

 discussions of those times, and in the early workings of the college. 



From this State Agricultural Society, and its indefatigable secretary, Mr. 

 Holmes, came the memorials to the Legislature, the personal examination of 

 the plans of making use for agricultural education, of the Normal School and 



