HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 301 



He should also know how long it takes to gain a practice and a 

 living, and that it is not the easiest nor pleasantest thing in the 

 world to be continually coming in contact with sick people. To- 

 day, we have more doctors than are needed for health; more 

 lawyers than are needed for justice; more ministers than are 

 needed for religion, and more middlemen than the farmers can 

 support. Thus the boy is receiving impressions easily and car- 

 rying on this education himself, without realizing it. When the 

 time comes that the boy has reached the limit of the district 

 school the father wishes he could have a more liberal education, 

 but his observations have made him afraid that if the boy studies 

 too much in the current schools of to-day, he will be desirous of 

 being a bookkeeper or clerk and get out of sympathy with man- 

 ual labor; and the father hesitates about educating him further. 

 Now is the time when tllie boy should be put in some horticul- 

 tural school to strengthen his powers of observation, to broaden 

 his ideas of horticulture, and to increase his knowledge of the 

 natural sciences which underlie all agricultural and horticultural 

 operations. 



What these studies should be, I will not enumerate, but will 

 say that the curriculum, as laid out for the agricultural school of 

 the University of Minnesota, carried out fully and with special 

 prominence given to the natural sciences, but with the require- 

 ment of an additional year of study, would meet the necessities 

 of our present needs as well as that of any course I know. The 

 young man would know more about horticulture and agriculture 

 than anything else, and there would be no trouble about his fol- 

 lowing them as an occupation, and when the time came for him 

 to decide on a profession for life with a seriousness that should 

 be given to such a choice, he will choose this branch because he 

 is most familiar with its great possibilities, and he has become 

 acquainted with the idea that "it is the man who makes the oc- 

 cupation," and not "the occupation that makes the man," and 

 that horticulture yields as good interest for the money invested, 

 as any safe business, and that it does not make so much differ- 

 ence what business a man goes into as how he applies himself to 

 it. After such a training the young graduate would naturally 

 turn his attention to the cultivation of the soil, and I know if 

 such young men will follow the practical part after they gradu- 

 ate and obtain reasonable experience in practical lines of horti- 

 culture, they will not lack for positions which are interesting 

 and also remunerative. 



