STATE HORTICULTUBAL SOCIETY. 211 



all who are ready to receive it. Whose fault is it if the majority 

 of students choose to graduate as bachelors of science with the 

 scientific knowledge required in agriculture, and not as bachelors 

 of agriculture, without the linguistic and mathematical knowl- 

 edge which all students need! Are not these students wise in 

 fitting themselves first for influential citizenship? A.nd what 

 possible use can there be in multiplying colleges, when we al- 

 ready have all that the work to be done requires ? Gentlemen, 

 I will be perfectly plain, even at the risk of incurring your dis- 

 pleasure. There is no need of a distinctively agricultural edu- 

 cation so large as to make work for a separate college. Strip 

 these agricultural colleges of the subjects which every high 

 school or college, not agricultural, must teach and does teach, 

 and what a miserable skeleton of a curriculum or course of study 

 you would have left ! 



One great danger, and one that, as a state, we ought carefully 

 to avoid, is the unnecessary duplication of educational institu- 

 tions for the same work. The university and the normal schools 

 ought not to do work which the high schools can do. It has 

 been necessary in the piist for them to do some of this work, 

 but they ought to relinquish it just as fast as the high schools 

 become able to do it. They are moving now in the right direc- 

 tion, and soon, it is to be hoped, that the university will do 

 only proper college work, and the normal schools will be largely 

 relieved of grammar school work, and will do their proper work 

 more exclusively — the fitting of scholars to teach. So, to main- 

 tain two universities or colleges, having essentially the same 

 course of disciplinary studies, and differing only in that one has 

 a special trend towards agriculture, is a waste of the public 

 revenue, and ought not to be thought of. And I go further than 

 this. If we are to have a university worthy of the State, we 

 must make it the seat of all the higher learning fostered and 

 maintained by the State. If a school of mining and metallurgy 

 is needed, it should be at the university. So of every other 

 special school in the interest of the higher education. For all 

 these the library of the university, like the heart in the human 

 body, can serve to send life to every part. Laboratories, collec- 

 tions of specimens, museums, all can be made serviceable without 

 additional expense, as could not be the case if a school of mining is 

 to be in one place, a school of botany in another, and so on. It 

 is by concentration at one point, of the educational forces and 

 material, and not by separation and a weak duplication of forces, 



