184 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



places and excluding them from those high positions where broader educational 

 attainments are indispensable, then I can see no good reason for its existence. 

 I think it is to the honor of Michigan Agricultural College that we find among 

 its graduates men who are in high positions as scientists, educators, and 

 journalists. I do not attach a very high degree of importance to the percent- 

 age of our graduates that go back to the farm, and I think the time is not far 

 distant when but few will care to ask how many of our graduates are farmers, 

 but it is of vast importance that the college should do the best possible work 

 in fitting the young men of the industrial classes who attend it, by giving them 

 a liberal and practical education, such as shall fit them for the "several pur- 

 suits and professions of life." Not how many farmers does your college turn 

 out, but how many useful, practical, efficient men. This is what the college 

 aims to do. For a long period the idea of an education was entirely separated 

 from the work and business of life. It was something for the few, and, instead 

 of being meant to make these few more helpful to the many in the way of making 

 the burdens they had to bear fewer or lighter, it was rather to separate them 

 from the common herd and elevate them to a position where they looked down 

 with stoical indifference upon the toiling millions, without either the disposition 

 or the ability to help them. So long as this was the dominant idea of an educa- 

 tion there was but little taught except philosophy, so called, and that phil- 

 osophy was very largely the fine spun theories of blundering egotists. Then 

 the study of the dead languages came to constitute an important part of au 

 education. This is a study which unquestionably has a refining influence upon 

 the mind which pursues it. It enlarges the range of knowledge, although, 

 after all, an intelligent reader will get more mental pabulum from reading 

 the works of Shakespeare than can be gleaned from all the ancient classics. 



The result of the old idea of an education was to make pedants and egotists 

 who would regard it as degrading to soil their hands with anything relating to 

 the world work, so they went through the world with their feet in its puddles 

 and their head in the clouds. It never entered the minds of these so-called 

 scholars that education was to benefit the race, and so the world went on cen- 

 tury after century, almost absolutely without progress. Generations came 

 and went, each leaving the world as they found it. At length a few men of 

 genius discovered for themselves, and revealed to the world that there were 

 other books besides the disquisitions of philosophers. They began to unfold 

 the great book of nature that God had been writing all along the ages for 

 men to read, and which they had too long neglected. Then men begun to 

 learn as they had never learned before. It was the bursting forth of a new 

 era of light and glory, which brought in its train the unnumbered discoveries 

 and inventions that go to constitute the civilization of this nineteenth century. 

 The old education made a few dreamers, and left the masses helplessly toiling 

 on in darkness and degradation. The philosophy and languages of the 

 schools brought no progress and but little elevation to the race, but the new 

 education gave mankind the steam engine, the locomotive, the railroad, the 

 telegraph and the thousand improved methods of doing the varied work of life. 

 In short, it has given to man that dominion over the material world which 

 Heaven designed he should have, and which could only come to him through 

 the study of the natural sciences, in which he is taught concerning inorganic 

 matter, and the laws of organic life. 



While not regardless of those studies which are essential to the training of 

 the powers of the individual mind, such as mathematics, through algebra, 

 geometry, and trigonometry, also the art of "speaking and writing the Eng- 



