230 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



a lot of those bo^'s who were thrust into the college because their par- 

 ents saw no other place in life for them to go. Perhaps their fathers 

 saw they had not brains enough to make lawyers or. doctors, and they 

 were too wild to be put into the city colleges, and so were sent to 

 pasture in the agricultural colleges and turned loose on the world 

 later on. I know something of them. We have in Ontario a sort of 

 pasture ground for a great many English youths who are sent over 

 from London, whose fathers are wealthy and do not know what to 

 do with them; they send them over to our agricultural college in Ontario, 

 and there the authorities try to fill them with learning, and the boys 

 try to fill the place with mischief. , 



Mr. Hale: Which succeeds best? 



Prof. Craig: Well, it is even up; sometimes the boys get ahead. 

 But to return to what I intended to say at the first. It was that 

 there are four or five stations that stand out prominently ahead of 

 all others in the good work, today; and, I may mention without any 

 invidious comparison, Michigan stands not far from the head, if not 

 at the head of this small list which I have made of the whole lot. 

 The work done by the experiment station of Michigan Agricultural col- 

 lege, and particularly that department in which I am interested, the 

 horticultural department, stands well up in the list of all the col- 

 leges in the United States. In some cases the character of the work 

 is such that it touches our conditions, and therefore comes nearer to 

 us, and is of a kind which is not only scientific but unites science 

 with practice; and I just wish to say, as an entire outsider and one 

 entirely unbiased, that it seems to me that any farmer who is al)le 

 and does not give his son an opportunity of a full course, and if not 

 a full course such a short course as Professor Taft has outlined this 

 afternoon, is doing his son an injustice which his son will be inclined 

 to remember in his later days, and for which he himself will probably 

 be sorry sometime during his life. 



The President: There is a common practice among politicians of 

 saying, "We point with pride,'' in their platforms — of o])ening a plat- 

 form with that expression, and the .Michigan Agricultural college, if 

 they would say anything to you, might say, "We point with ])T'ide to 

 the young men we have turned out, who are now occu])ying i)romi- 

 nent positions." They could give you a long list o*f men who are known 

 the length and breadth of this nation, who a few years ago were mere 

 Michigan farm boys, who are now making their mark in the world, 

 and from whose heads has come information that has yielded mil- 

 lions of dollars to us other fellows who are plodding along. The 

 Michigan Agricultural college has that record, and if you will take 

 pains to investigate it you will find it so. 



