FARMERS' INSTITUTES. 



617 



We agreed to send one State speaker to each One-day Institute, requir- 

 ing the meetings in each county to be held in a series, on consecutive 

 days; also requiring that our speaker be entertained while in the county 

 and transported from meeting to meeting. County Institute societies 

 were requested to appoint a local manager for each One-day Institute, 

 who should bear much the same relation to the County Secretary as that 

 officer does to the State Board. In arranging meetings, the Superintend- 

 ent corresponded both with the Secretary and President of the County 

 Institute Society, and directly with the local manager, and the Secretary 

 was also requested to correspond freely with the local managers. 



RESULTS. 



It will be seen by the table that 71 of these One-day winter meetings 

 were held in 19 counties. We went into the work with full faith that this 

 form of Institute would be a great success, basing our hopes upon the 

 experiments of the previous season in Ionia and Sanilac counties. (See 

 p. xviii, Institute Bulletin for 1896-7). Our plans were somewhat experi- 

 mental, as we had little experience to go by so far as the organization for 

 this particular form of Institute was concerned. Most of the Secretaries 

 of counties to which the One-day meetings had been assigned took hold of 

 the matter with enthusiasm and did an enormous amount of work to> 

 make the plan a success. Great credit is also due many of the local man- 

 agers for similar hard work. In a few cases, however, we must say that, 

 either through negligence or through misunderstanding of the plans, the 

 attendance and results were by no means what they should have been. 

 That this criticism is just, is shown by the results in those counties where 

 the work was properly done. In such counties the results were beyond 

 our expectations. The meetings were in some cases as large as the aver- 



