SOME NEXT STEPS IN THE DEVELOPMENT 



OF THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE AND 



EXPERIMENT STATION 



EUGENE DAVENPORT, Dean of the College of Agriculture 



HE original purpose of the Land Grant Act and its farseeing 

 promoters was to provide a suitable education for farmers 

 and "mechanics," as shopmen were then called. By a 

 "suitable education" was meant not only information and 

 training in the subjects directly related to agriculture and 

 the mechanic arts, but also an education in the relation of 

 industry to other professions in life, and of artisans to the body politic, 

 this latter idea being specifically embodied in the phrase, "without 

 excluding other scientific and classical studies." 



Instruction in the "other scientific and classical studies" proceeded 

 successfully from the first, for neither the subject matter nor the 

 method needed to be different from that adapted to the needs of other 

 students. History has but one meaning to humanity, and that mean- 

 ing is the same for the farmer and for the philosopher. The appeal 

 of literature is as broad as the instincts of the race and the capacities 

 of the individual and, outside of those who make literature a profes- 

 sion, it is not influenced by occupation. The facts of nature are abid- 

 ing truths, and while they may be put to different uses by different 

 people of varied occupations, yet there is a vast body of knowledge 

 common to all peoples and fundamental to all needs. 



Instruction in these fields of knowledge, therefore, encountered 

 no special problems peculiar to their association with agriculture, but 

 not so much could be said as to the technical subjects bearing directly 

 upon the profession of farming. With the early attempts to teach 

 the technical portion of an agricultural education, it became clearer 

 with every passing year that farming had not yet risen above the 

 status of an art and that an art which depends for its successful prac- 

 tise upon so many and so varied local conditions as does farming is 

 practically unteachable in college. 



THE COMING OF THE EXPERIMENT STATION 



Accordingly, in the late eighties the appeal was made to Congress 

 for a supplementary act endowing agricultural research, in order that 

 agencies might be provided for the discovery of something really 

 tangible, to be elaborated into teaching form. So was the Experiment 



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