PROCEEDINGS OF THE ANNUAL MEETING. 229 



Mr. M. A. Thayer: I have had some experience in the employment of 

 short-course men. and it is my experience that every farm-boy in the 

 country should take a short course. It is a grand thing. But the 

 greatest trouble is, it seems to me slow, so few get the benefit of it. 

 In Wisconsin it is limited to 100 per year, and still that is a fair 

 attendance. I have no doubt it is the same in Michigan and other 

 states. It seems to me it is too slow to reach the masses of people. 

 The education of our farmer boys, in my opinion, must come largely 

 from the newspapers <'f the country. We need more of them. The 

 fact is, the subscriprn n to our newspapers ought to be increased a 

 hundred per cent. We have agricultural and horticultural papers in 

 this country that should count their subscribers by the million. We 

 have in our farmers' homes too great a scarcity of the newspaper. 

 Now, we all know what the relation of cultivation is to products, in 

 a practical way. I believe that the same relation exists between the 

 newspapers and the home, and there ought to be some way devised 

 by which those papers can he put into the homes of all our farmers. 



Mr. J. G. Eamsdell of Traverse City: I will say a word as a friend 

 of the college. I have been intimately acquainted with it and its work 

 since its very foundation. It has not been all that it might have been. 

 It has been singularly blest with the best faculty, or as good a faculty, 

 as a college ever had, from its very foundation to the present time. 

 The board of agriculture, up to recent times, have been extremely con- 

 servative, but that was not the worst. The worst was the lament- 

 able ignorance and unreasoning prejudice of such farmers as chanced 

 to be elected to our legislature. Now, there may be some difficulty 

 with the boys, but the great difficulty is in the wide space between 

 the way practical agriculture is carried on and the idea they get at 

 the college. Their ideas are beyond their means when they get home. 

 They have a sort of mania for experimenting, and they are very likely 

 to fail for want of the means; and I fear that if Mr. Hale should 

 take a person because he was well educated at a college, and gradu- 

 ated from the Agricultural college, and place him upon his fruit farm, 

 he would be experimenting on Mr. Hale's money. I think that is one 

 of the difficulties of our college. 



Prof. John Craig of Ottawa, Canada: It is sometimes interesting 

 to see ourselves as dthers see us, and across the border I have an 

 opportunity (as your experiment stations on this side are kind enough 

 to send us copies of all the bulletins issued, and the annual reports) 

 of comparing the work of each, as it appears on paper, at least, and 

 occasionally I have an opportunity of comparing the actual work of 

 the stations, as I have this morning, comparing it with the work of 

 our stations in Canada. There are in my mind four or five stations 

 (I am not in college work, but purely experimental work) in the United 

 States that stand out in bold relief in comparison with all others for 

 doing work which seems to me eminently practical, and work which 

 comes near to and touches the farmer, and which, as one gentleman 

 who spoke said, is the kind that would incite in a student a love for 

 the work; and that, it seems to me, is at the root of the whole matter 

 that Mr. Hale brought up. Now, he may have had experience with 



