436 Abstract Report of Agricultural Discussions. 



Meeting of Weeldy Couvcil, May VJtl. Tlie President, Sii' E. C. 

 Kerrison, Bart., M.P., in tlie Chair. Mr. J. Chalmers Morton read a 

 Paper on 



Agricultural Education. 



The paper to be read this morning is, I fear, of a very diflferent 

 order from those which generally and most worthily engage attention 

 at the weekly meetings of this Society, for I have no unusual agri- 

 cultiu-al experience to relate, nor any new facts or observations to 

 describe. It is indeed an argument rather than a history which I 

 have ventured upon — one, too, which is, I believe, liable to be con- 

 sidered, either, on the one hand, as too general and discursive for an 

 audience of practical agricultiu-ists ; or, on the other, as too pointedly 

 levelled at the recent resolutions of the Council on its subject, to bo 

 within the competence of a mere ordinary member of the Society at 

 any except oiu* annual general meetings. On this point, however, I 

 must at once declare that it has not been my wish to discuss this 

 subject controversially at all, and that I shall make no reference 

 whatever to what the Council have, after their ample and prolonged 

 discussion of it, thought it right to do. 



I hope, indeed, that I may be allowed at the close of my statement 

 to point out where aud how, as it seems to me, the influence of the 

 Eoyal Agricultural Society in the promotion of agricultural education 

 may be most usefidly applied, but this I shall do with no reference 

 whatever to the plan v/hich has been already adopted, and no desire 

 to bring that plan under discussion now. The object of this paper 

 principally has been to deterniino and place in the order of their 

 relative importance the elements of a good agricultural education ; and 

 especially to ascertain and indicate where it is that the existing agi'i- 

 cultui'al education thus appears to be deficient. The plan of the 

 paper accordingly has been — 1st, so to describe the business of the 

 farmer as to illustrate the abilities and qualities he must possess and 

 exercise during its successful prosecution ; 2nd, to consider the educa- 

 tional process by which these abilities and qualities may be best 

 acquu'cd ; 3rd, to give such illustrations as I have been able to collect 

 of the progress and existing state of agi-icultural education among us ; 

 and, 4th, to consider what may be practicable or desirable in the 

 further promotion of it. 



The Occupation of the Farmer. 



1. First, then, of the Occupation of the Farmer. — Agriculture is an 

 art or manufacture. It is also a business or a trade. And people 

 have of late years got into the habit of calling it a science. By this 

 last designation it can however of course be meant only that the facts 

 which make up the experience of the farmer — like those indeed of 

 every other experience whatsoever — are recognised by men of science 

 as in perfect keeping with the kno^-n laws of Nature. There is 

 nothing in the field or feeding-house of which a thousand examples 

 in other departments of observation have not been studied and 

 recorded. To the physiologist, the chemist, the botanist, and cntomo- 



