statp: grangp: of Illinois. 81 



2d. It is affirmed that we have no teachers of agriculture, and doubtlesa 

 great ditHculties have been experienced in filling one or two special 

 chairs. But good teachers of agriculture, chemistry, botany, geology, 

 zoology, mineralogy and meterology, and indeed of all the sciences required 

 for tiie understanding of agriculture, are and have been abundant; and now 

 the men needed for the special chair of theoretic agriculture are increas- 

 ing in numbers and ability. 



3d. It has also been asserted thai we have no science to teach ; that 

 there are no text-books on agriculture; that agricultural science is in an 

 imperfect and fragmentar}' condition. 



Have the men that say this read that large body of facts and principles 

 handed down from Columella of the ancients, and wrought out bj-^ Young 

 and TuU, by Leibig, and Thear, and Bousingaull, and Leconteau, by John- 

 ston, and Laws, and Gilbert, by Professors Johnston, and Brewer, and 

 Thomas, and by the agricultural writers of England, Europe and Ameri- 

 ca? Have they counted the multiplying columns of agricultural facts 

 established by the hundred Versucht Stationes, the experiment stations of 

 Europe? 



No branch of human learning is yet complete, No science has yet set- 

 tled all its principles, solved all its problems and classified all its facts. 

 Agriculture may be j-ounger and less complete than some of the others, 

 but in few departments of learning is there so much gathered and proved 

 and ready to the teacher's hand, as in this. Its very voluminous accumu- 

 lations may require some laborious sifting. And then all the sciences of 

 nature are sciences relating to agriculture. 



4th. Another obstacle of much more sweeping character has been 

 asserted to lie in the weakness, one-sidedness and insuflSciency of an edu- 

 cation made up chiefly of scientific studies. There are not wanting men, 

 champions mostly of some old college, which feels its weakness and 

 fears rivalry; who denounce agricultural colleges as an educational hum- 

 bug, a species of charlatanry, and seek to frighten away students from 

 our doors by decrying the value of the education which we give. 



I do not care to go into a comparison here and now, of the relative 

 value of scientific and classical studies; but. it is worthy of notice, that 

 many of the great leaders of human thought to-day — the men who are 

 filling the world with the noise of their discoveries, and attracting uni- 

 versal admiration for the splendor of their genius and the power of their 

 eloquence, are the students and representatives of physical science. 



But the issue is totally false and unnecessary, since the agricultural 

 colleges never exclude the element of linguistic culture, nor the mathe- 

 matical and historical studies, while they teach the scientific studies by a 

 method so thorough and practical as to preclude the possibility of their 

 being made mere exercises of the memory, and call the judgment into 

 use as constantly and as fruitfully as the best teaching of the classics ever 

 could. 



5th. The unjust suspicion has sometimes been circulated of a want of 



