AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. 9 



For the continuance therefore of bis education, but just begun at college, and for his best 

 service to society, the student should be well trained in science. But neither student nor 

 teacher should eyor forget the agricultural aim in view. The teaching of the sciences should 

 be saturated, as it were, with the agricultural element, with illustrations drawn from the 

 art, and constant applications of principles to the business of the farmer. 



In brief then, the college should impart to the young farmer the elements of such in- 

 struction as makes a man and a citizen, should ground him in the sciences on which agri- 

 culture depends, should indoctrinate him in the best existing rules and practice of his ait, 

 should make him alive to its needs, acquainted with the theories, discussion?, and experi- 

 ment!) going on for its advancement, and fire him with enthusiasm to place bis business on 

 a par with those in which skill, intelligence, and thorough scientific preparation receive on 

 all hands a due appreciation. 



AlM'l.iKO s-CIEXCE IX THE IXSTUUCTIOX. 



Practical agriculture is taught as an art, based on experience. The question asked is, 

 what method of management will yield the greatest profit without the impoverish ing of the 

 soil? For an answer it goes to the best farmers of the neighborhood, the State, the world, 

 and critically examines bow they do. It takes account, of course, of climate, market, cost 

 of labor. It attempts also to give the scholar a wider than a one years' view. It may show 

 that a root crop that does not pay so large returns one year as another in its place would 

 do, may repay in the end, if labor can be put upon it, in the oxidation of the soil which its 

 frequent stirring has promoted, or by the eradication of weeds. It may ask the student to 

 try the effects or a mixed husbandry for a series of years with a succession of sudden 

 changes, as from sheep to hope. 



The instruction in given in a scries of daily lessons for one half year, and another scries 

 of three a week for another half year. Lectures are sometimes given in the fields and 

 barns. The farm now, for the first time since the students received it a wilderness to be 

 cleared and subdued, furnishes an illustration of well-shaped and partially drained fields 

 under a system of rotation of crops. The summer beauty of the farm, its almost entire 

 freedom from weeds, its respectable crops, have elicited high praise from the farmers who 

 have visited it. The stock, which a few years ago was wretched, has become good through 

 a system of a sale of a few inferior for the means of purchasing a better animal. 



The operations of horticulture, entomology embracing bee-keeping, the practice of drain- 

 age, of surveying, are all elucidated in lectures. 



Agricultural chemistry comes in with its course of a half years' daily lectures, and in- 

 cludes dairying, and many other things less treated of in practical agriculture. From a new 

 point of view it reviews much of the ground that practical agriculture goes over. Vegetable 

 physiology, in charge of the professor of botany, does the fame. We have as it were, 

 three professors of agriculture, each in his separate rjeld of labor. 



Lying back of these is the science of chemistry in its purer form, a course of lectures 

 for a half year followed by three hours of daily work for another half year in the chemical 

 laboratory, and by a half years' daily lectures in chemical physics and meteorology. By a 

 half year, I mean an hour daily five days in the week for half a college year, which year 

 is the same length of time with us as at the university, and at colleges generally. 



Similarly botany, vegetable physiology, anatomy, physiology, entomology, geology, lie 

 back of other instruction. Surely our course of study, considered as a whole, is sufficiently 

 distinctive, and holds sufficiently close to the governing idea of an agricultural education. 



The older institutions certainly show that little is to be hoped from them in the way of 

 educating young men to be farmers. The department of agriculture in colleges and uni- 

 versities Lave not succeeded in obtaining students. Suppose that an experiment has been . 

 tried here which was found to increase the proportion of educated men that go to farming 

 nearly forty-fold, would one not think that farmers would look upon it with favor and some 

 pride? This is what the college and a few like it have done; they have made educated men to 

 be good farmers in forty-fold greater proportion than any or all other colleges, and yet it bangs 

 in doubt each two years whether a legislature of farmers will permit it to live or abandon it 

 to die. Established primarily as a school tor instruction, as a reading of the laws and dis- 

 cussions will show, it is looked upon with disfavor because it fails to do as rapidly as some 

 farmers have hoped, some other things besides educating young men to be farmers. 



THEY LEAVE THE FARMS. 



Out of school like this will any graduates return to the farms* Does not manual labor 

 seem ignoble to one whose early youth is given to the acquiring of knowledge and the dis- 

 cipline of mind ? Will not the habit of hard acd daily manual labor be over-difficult to at- 

 tain after several years of its disuse? 



From almost every quarter the answer comes that it is of no use to try. The prediction flew 



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