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No. 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 787 



One day I was out on the farm and I had a piece of ground that was 

 acting refractory and stubborn. I was puzzled with it. I says, 

 "John, what is the matter with that land." I was surprised to hear 

 coming out of that old German farmer's lips the words, "That land 

 got no humus." He had learned the lesson when a child. And he 

 went on to say that humus was decayed vegetable matter, that it 

 was plant food, that it served to hold the moisture in the soil, and 

 he says, "Without the moisture the plant cannot grow," or as he 

 says, "The plant drinks, it don't eat." That German farmer peasant 

 had been better equipped in his childhood with the science of agri- 

 culture than 99 out of a hundred of American farmers to-day, fifty 

 years old. Now, who did that for that German farmer peasant boy? 

 His government did it. His government had the practical under- 

 standing and ability to look away down to the roots of things, and 

 see that at the kinder school, the child's school, shall acquaint the 

 child with the meaning of the terms. When I started in the Hoard's 

 Dairyman the feeding department questions and answers, I re- 

 ceived thousands of letters from farmers all over the United States, 

 What do you mean by the terms you use? What do you mean by 

 protein,' carbo-hydrates, nutritive rations? These men were not 

 without brains, these men were earnest thinking men, but their gov- 

 ernment, their state, had not done its duty by them. It had never 

 taught them the meaning of the terms they were obliged to meet 

 in agricultural study and reading, and of a necessity it was to them 

 like a foreign language. There were no equivalents in these words 

 I could find. I had to use the words, and so I put a glossary up 

 there at the head of the department, a little dictionary explaining 

 the meanings of all these terms that I had to use in agricultural 

 chemistry. I got hundreds of letters thanking me for the informa- 

 tion, for these things were made plain to them. That is one reason 

 to-day why farmers do not read more; it is because their common 

 school has not equipped them with the information that they are 

 justly entitled to. It is not because they have not good brains. It 

 is because the system of education throughout the United States 

 is a wrong system. It is reaching for a higher education, but God 

 knows there is no such thing as higher education. All facts and 

 all knowledge are correlative, co-related. The words higher educa- 

 tion is a misnomer. It has no business in your vocabulary or mine. 

 The word to use would be a wider education, not higher. There is 

 no altitude in education, it is width. So you see if a man occupied 

 a foot of knowledge, the thing for him to do is then to occupy an- 

 other foot, and take in a wider range of judgment and understand- 

 ing. Now, what effect has that had upon your country? From the 

 Atlantic coast to the Rocky Mountains the pathway of the agricul- 

 tural farmer has been full of destitution and destruction. I can go 

 into New York and Pennsylvania and Iowa to-day and find farms that 

 I would have been obliged to pay $100 an acre in 1868, and I can 

 buy them to-day for $30 and $40. What means that tremendous 

 loss to the State? Lack of knowledge has cost in those years fifteen 

 hundred millions of dollars in the decline of her farm values. Do 

 you see what this means to the well-being of a state? 



Now, what I have to say to you this afternoon is on a line of 

 "Some Things in Cross Breeding." 



