220 ANNUAL REPORT 



vitalizing sap in this way. It cannot be poured into their veins 

 and capilliaries from any overflowing vessel without, but the roots 

 must strike deep into the fertile soil and gather in the life-giving 

 fluid through a thousand slender fibres and send it coursing up the 

 massive trunks, out through the sturdy limbs, to every swaying 

 branch and quivering twig, to each tiny spray and trembling leaf 

 carrying nourishment to every part. Boys must grow and develop 

 like the trees. They must reach out with the fibres of thought, lay 

 hold of and gather in, important truths, digest and assimilate, 

 making them a part of themselves. Facts gleaned from whatever 

 source, should be made the basis of protracted clean cut thought 

 and of such additional conclusions as the students own intellectual 

 strength and reasoning powers permit them to reach, acts are of 

 value only as they can be used, and a boy with his head stuffed 

 with a miscellaneous collection of them will never be in demand 

 except as a cyclopedia. But when a scholar has been trained to 

 seize hold of a few important ones, and, taking them for a founda- 

 tion, to build upon them an impregnable superstructure, all his 

 own, he has made a long stride in the direction of a valuable edu- 

 cation. Such an one will go out of the school with his mind 

 broadened and strengthened for the work the future will demand 

 of him. If, on the other hand, we teach boys to be only imitators 

 of others, whether in the horticultural, agricultural or any other 

 line, and to know nothing of the work they are to do except as 

 they have seen it done by others and under whose directions they 

 have undertaken its performance themselves, they may achieve 

 skill, but will never make progress, and whenever the conditions 

 which surround them change, then skill, not being the offspring of 

 scientific knowledge and mental acumen, cannot be turned to prac- 

 tical account. If we intensify their intellectual keenness and 

 strengthen their judgment by careful analytical thought, each one 

 as he steps out of the school, at the close of the year, will find him- 

 self decidedly in advance of the position he occupied at the begin- 

 ning, and the world will look to him with confidence for something 

 better than it conld have expected under the word memorizing 

 system of which we had the full benefit. 



I remember the first time I made my way through the back 

 woods of Minnesota. After walking fifty miles I looked upon that 

 burned and desolate prairie and saw it stretching before me black 

 as erebus dismal as Sahara and boundless as the sea and thought to 

 myself what a work there is to be done here before this is fit to be 

 settled up and cultivated by civilized man. Now, the people who 

 set the fires which made the prairie so gloomy and forbidding 



