AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. 19 



manual labor is insisted on from all, if we can speak of insisting on what students offer in 

 excess of our requirements. To this end there is no furnishing of easier or more tasteful 

 work to the seniors than is given to other students ; the habit of work and taste for it is kept 

 up to the end. To this same end the labor system and the instruction are planned to match 

 each other, to illustrate each other, so that to the labor is given some of the dignity of scien- 

 tific work, and to the scientific instruction labor serves as a kind of laboratory practice for 

 instruction. 



To the same end the labor, instead of being a few hours now and then like that furnished 

 in the dissecting room, is made a daily and continuous tiling, a real and productive work, 

 for which in return it is but fair, at least in the present undeveloped state of the college, 

 that moderate compensation should be allowed. 



The result of these efforts to create a truly agricultural school appears in the fact that in 

 place of 1$ per cent of graduates going to farming, as from other colleges, 88 per cent, or, 

 not counting those not living and those who are still students, 42 per cent have gone to 

 farming, fruit-raising, and the nursery business as their chief or only business. In this re- 

 spect the college is doing what has never been done before, sending men with good educa- 

 tion in fair proportion back to work farms. If this agency is dropped, what is to supply 

 its place? Not newspapers and clubs, for they fail to supply the underlying scientific 

 training that is needed here and there through communities; not departments of colleges, 

 for they will have almost no agricultural students ; not the colleges themselves, for they edu- 

 cate all but 1} per cent of their graduates away from the farms. 



What kind of farmers graduates will make remains in good part to be seen. No profes- 

 sional school educates a man to take at once a prominent place in tho rank he enti-r-. 

 Farming is a business in which experience, native good judgment, and skill acquired in 

 actual management, count for so much that graduates must be allowed time to find their 

 proper place. 



Diligent inquiry has failed t make it appear that they imbibe any habits of extravagance, 

 or of a theorizing practice from their college course (as some have feared), in coming from :i 

 school for which the Stale does so much. All the graduates stand respectably in their sev- 

 eral callings, and not a few of them stand very high. 



STUDENTS IS SELECT STUDIES. 



I have spoken of graduates only, merely because I have statistics regarding them. W- 

 are sometimes asked the cost of making a graduate, as if that work were the chief end of 

 the college. But it is not. To educate young men is the chief end. We always have a body 

 of young men who take a select course of study. These yonng men are amongst the oldest 

 and most valuable of the students. We have, besides, many who come to take in regular 

 course, the chemistry, botany, and agriculture, but who do not go through the course. The 

 instruction imparted to them is equally valuable so far as it goes. A student who completes 

 our sophomore, or second year, has had a year of botany and horticulture, a half-year of 

 physical geography, a half-year of chemistry, a half-year of practice three hours a day in 

 chemical analysis and surveying, besides a variety of other useful studies. By a half-year I 

 mean one lesson, daily, five days a week, for one-half a school year. Our school year is tin- 

 same number of weeks as at the university and at other colleges. 



GRADUATES WHO ABB NOT FARMERS. 



The preceding remarks refer to graduates and others who become farmers, as if the whale 

 usefulness at the institution was to be measured by them. This is not true however. The 

 influence of the peculiar education received here will make itself felt in whatever field of 

 labor the graduates may enter. It is sometimes asked, 



ARE" THEY EMINENT? 



As to this, bow few are eminent in any calling ! 



Go through the long lists of law and medical graduates, and how many of them have at- 

 tained to fame? Eminence is attained only now and then by the few who excel in talents, 

 energy, or opportunities. Were all men eminent, none would be eminent. A college course, 

 a professional course of study, moreover, only begins the education of any man ; years of 

 practice are required for perfection. 



But the graduates of the agricultural college are here and there throughout the commu- 

 nity, like other graduates, attending to the duties of their vocation, showing the results of 

 their studies in their example, their conversation, their newspaper articles, essays, addresses, j 

 inciting young men around them to a desire for a higher education. 



TEACHERS. 



The agricultural college can point to its full share of graduates in honorable and respon- 

 sible places. It U a credit to the college that Cornell Lniveruity chose a graduate of ours ; 



