17i 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



science be brought to bear on those arts. It meant to provide for the 

 education of men who could develop them and improve them. Merely 

 to add, to the millions now intelligently practising these arts, a few 

 more intelligent farmers or artisans each year, would be a wretchedly 

 inadequate return for these endowments. The places for imparting 

 the simple, usual practical education for agricultural and mechanical 

 pursuits are the millions of farms and workshops in the country. No- 

 where else can such practical knowledge be afforded so cheaply or so 

 effectively. 



The national institutions for education should, indeed, have farms 

 and workshops ; but the foremost object of these should be, not to 

 afford simple employment to young men,, but to give them, in connec- 

 tion with their studies in the sciences, what may be called laboratories, 

 where they can see science applied in as practical a manner as possible 

 — laboratories, whether field or shop, where they can see sciences 

 limited by the necessities of practice. It cannot be too much insisted 

 upon that the main object of these institutions should be to send out 

 men, with minds trained by observ^ation and experiment, to develop the 

 various agricultural and other industries, and to improve them, and 

 not simply to increase, by an almost infinitesimal fraction, the number 

 of those engaged in the usual industries pursued with a little more in- 

 telligence, in the usual way. 



But it is said that scientific and industrial education does not bet- 

 ter agriculture. Does it not? Of all assertions this is the most fear- 

 ful indictment against the most extended field of human thought and 

 work. If this be true, then is agriculture the only industrial pursuit 

 unworthy of a human being ; for this assertion would not be made 

 against any other branch of human industry. But it is not true. 

 The whole history of agriculture shows exactly the reverse of this. 

 Look at those wonderful " Tables in Comparative Sociology," by Her- 

 bert Spencer, just issued, and study there the progress of agriculture 

 and other industries from their rudest beginnings, and you see that 

 skill in observation and reasoning on observation have been steadily 

 improving agriculture, at the same time that they have improved other 

 industries. 



But grant that the number of students devoted wholly to agricult- 

 ure is small, it is not these alone whose education tells upon agricult- 

 ure. Even a partial course in it has great value. It was the remark 

 of a very distinguished statesman of this Commonwealth — one who 

 occupied this desk as Speaker, yonder chamber as Governor, and who 

 received the suffrages of many of his countrymen for the highest oflice 

 in their gift — that the main thing in agricultural education is to do 

 something to make agricultural pursuits attractive. His view is that 

 whereas in England every man longs to obtain a competency to enable 

 him to retire from the city, here men seek to escape from the country 

 to the city ; and that we should attempt to bring about a change of 



