STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 209 



deavor to give our staclents a good education We should train 

 them in the same subjects we are teaching- now. The larger por- 

 tion of our students would then, as now, take the scientific 

 course, and in that course they would learn those sciences upon 

 a knowledge of which, in some measure, success in agriculture 

 depends. More than half of our students would thus be engaged 

 in laying the foundation of a scientific knowledge of agriculture, 

 just as they are doing now. The university would be an agri- 

 cultural college — so called — with three or four hundred stu- 

 dents, but not one more student would be studying agriculture 

 than are studying it now. It would be a successful institution 

 and would have scholars and would be referred to as what a suc- 

 cess a separate college of agriculture could be made, while, in 

 reality, its success would not be owing in the least to its being 

 an agricultural college in any just sense, but to its being a great 

 deal more than an agricultural college. • Its students would be 

 there to gain general knowledge and not mainly to study agri- 

 culture. And I assert, without fear of successful contradiction, 

 that wherever a so-called successful agricultural college exists 

 in this country to-day the thing which attracts students to it is 

 not the fact that it is agricultural, but the fact that it is a 

 great deal besides that and the further fact that it is possible to 

 enter this agricultural college — -so called — with much less prep- 

 aration than would be required to enter institutions that do 

 not call themselves agricultural. 



Take, for example, the Iowa State Agricultural College at 

 Ames. Its faculty embraces professors in ethics, psychology, 

 the history of civilization, English, Latin, history, mathematics, 

 political economy, pathology, histology, therapeutics, compara- 

 tive anatomy, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, chem- 

 istry, zoology, physics, astronomy, elocution, rhetoric, drawing, 

 painting, music, besides those strictly agricultural. 



I think I am correct in saying that the annual expense of the 

 college is greater than that of the whole University of Minnesota. 

 And the requirements for admission to the freshman class of 

 this college at Ames are substantially the same as for our sub- 

 freshman class in the agricultural course, and not equal in 

 amount to half the requirements for admission to our subfresh- 

 man class in other departments. In other words, a boy who 

 could not pass the examinations to the upper classes of a Min- 

 nesota high school can enter the freshman class of the Iowa 

 agricaltural college with its twenty-seven professors and instruct- 



