FOREIGN AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. 219 



cultural experiment stations, and still further when it organized 

 a Department of Experiment Stations as an integral part of the 

 Department of Agriculture. 



But several of the countries of Europe have anticipated our 

 action in behalf of agricultural education by a quarter of a century. 

 Germany and France and little Switzerland realized fifty years ago 

 that agriculture in its various departments must be pursued with 

 the aid of the latest science combined with the broadest experience. 

 These countries have not Avaited for the laborer to perfect himself 

 in experience — an impossible attainment — but they have opened 

 schools of every possible grade, arranged courses of lectures by the 

 best educated scientists, made elementary agriculture a compul- 

 sory subject in the curricula of the common schools, sent out trav- 

 eling instructors to confer with and advise and give courses of lec- 

 tures to the older farmers, made it possible — even compulsory — 

 that young people should attend technical schools at odd hours of 

 the day or evening, and even tempted them to pass a serious exami- 

 nation in their respective studies by the offer of a valuable prize as 

 the reward of success. It is said that Charles Dickens once made 

 a speech at an agricultural dinner in which he somewhat derisively 

 said that " the field it paid the farmer best to cultivate was the one 

 within the ring fence of his own skull." Dickens was correct. The 

 farmer needs scientific education. The best civilized and progres- 

 sive nations of to-day are admitting the utterance of Dickens to be a 

 serious truth. Vast sums of money are appropriated by European 

 governments to prevent their agricultural classes from continuing 

 in or subsiding into ignorance of their art. Even the peasants of 

 Kussia, notably in the province of Ekaterinoslav, by the generous 

 appliances for special agricultural education made by the Ministry 

 of Agriculture and State Domains, united with the efforts of the 

 Ministry of Public Instruction, are made to feel that without expert 

 teaching a man can not succeed even in the raising of fowls or of 

 bees, the culture of silkworms, the making of wine, or the manuring 

 of his fields. Consul Heenan * says that in the province named 

 above the Government annually rents thirty-two experiment fields, 

 each eight acres in extent, distributed four in each district, and each 

 one located in the midst of peasant fields. Each of these fields is 

 placed in charge of some scientifically educated public-school teach- 

 er, who is paid twenty-five dollars per year for his direction, and 

 receives, besides, all the harvest produced. The teacher uses the 

 native tools and seeds, and hires neighbor peasants to assist in dem- 

 onstrating that with care in plowing, cleaning of seed, cultivating, 



* See United States Consular Reports, vol. Ivii, No. 215, August, 1898, article on Gar- 

 dener's Schools in Russia, by Consul Heenan. 



