FARMERS' INSTITUTES. 75 



education had not yet arrived. Tliomas P. Gill writes as follows of the 

 early movement in France: ''The National Society of Agriculture of 

 Prance, in 17G1, urged the appointment of agricultural professors, and 

 charged several of its own members with a propagandist mission to 

 arouse and enlighten agricultural opinion. Some great proprietors were 

 inspired by this means to found schools of agriculture in different 

 places. One was established at La Rochette in 1763, another near Com- 

 pi^gne in 1771, and agricultural instruction was given at the Seminary 

 of Angouleme. Louis XVI, in 1787, created an experimental sheep farm 

 at Rambouillet, where he introduced flocks of Spanish Merino sheep, 

 which soon greatly enhanced the prosperity of the farmers of LaBrie, 

 Beauce, l^urgundy, Champagne and Picardy. At the time of the Con- 

 vention the bases of the great system of technical education of France 

 were laid down, but nothing was done for agriculture. In 1800, Francois 

 de Neufchateau, a former minister of the interior, who had the distinc- 

 tion of foreseeing at that date the danger to European agriculture of 

 Ameircan competition, laid before Bonaparte an elaborate scheme for 

 agricultural education, which he had copied from the Abbe Rozier, who 

 had propounded it in 1770, but, though the First Consul in the main ap- 

 proved, the scheme was never carried out. In 1819 a private individual, 

 Matthieu de Dombasle, established, with funds which he had raised by 

 public subscription, an agricultural school near Nancy. This school 

 became yevy famous, and was frequented by pupils from Germany, 

 Austria, Switzerland and other parts of the continent; but when Dom- 

 basle died it had to succumb, as it was receiving no assistance from the 

 state. It left, however, its traces, for in 1829 the School of Grignon, 

 near Versailles, which has since been taken up by the state and made 

 one of the great national schools of agriculture, and in 1833 the school 

 of Grandjouan, and in 1840 of Saulsaie, which have also since become 

 state schools, w^ere founded by impils of Matthieu de Dombasle." The 

 flrst regular system of agricultural education supported by the state in 

 France was inaugurated by the law of 1848. 



Mulhall says that "it is hardly too much to say that Hungary has 

 done more than any other nation in the way of agricultural schools. 

 The first was established in 1779, at Zarvas, by a patriotic gentleman 

 named Samuel Teschedik; the second in 1786, by Cristof Nako, at Nagy- 

 Miklos; the third was the famous Georgicon Academy at Kezthely, 

 founded and liberally endowed by Count Festetics, in 1797. This last 

 was for a long period the model agricultural college of Europe, but 

 after a prosperous career of fifty years it was suppressed by the Aus- 

 trian government in 1848, because all the professors and pupils took 

 part in the struggle for independence under Kossuth." In Bohemia an 

 agricultural school was opened in the village of Tirnova in 1791. The 

 present system of instruction in Austria dates from 1850. 



The agricultural college of Hohenheim, Wurtemburg, perhaps the 

 most famous in the world, was founded in 1818. It has a large model 

 farm. The course is three years. Its attendance is about 100 students. 

 German speaking peoples have done much for agricultural education. 

 ''It was about one hundred years ago," writes C. K. Adams, in 1886, 

 "that Frederick the Great conceived the idea of improving the resources 

 of his kingdom by the establishment of agricultural schools and the re- 

 claiming and improving of waste lands. Everybody knows that the 

 absorbino- ambition of that creat monarch was to make Prussia one of 



