C AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. 



other States in managing the national grant of lands. In Illinois and New York itwent to 

 found universities like ours at Ann Arbor, with an Agricultural Department. But in this State 

 the existence of the best university of the West, affording a variety of courses of study to 

 the choice of students, classical, scientific, scientific with Latin, or with Greek, or with 

 modern languages, with schools of law, medicine, pharmacy, civil engineering, mining, this 

 narrowed at once the field that the Agricultural College had to occupy. 



SCHOOLS OF TECHNOLOGY. 



Incidentally I give it as my opinion, that aside from the labor system there was no occa- 

 eion for an institution separate from the university ; but that the education of farmers im- 

 peratively requires manual labor, and such separation. If this be a correct view, I would 

 Biippliment it by saying that no branches of a Technological School, which cannot harmonize 

 with this labor system, ought to be connected with the Agricultural College. I should deem 

 the interests of agricultural education imperilled by such extension. 



LADIES. 



I am strongly in favor of adding a department for women, and can see no reason why 

 such a one should not be useful and successful. Our limited experience has been in favor 

 of the plan. Several other institutions report classes of ladies in horticulture and other 

 branches. Could we accommodate the ladies who apply for admission, they might receive 

 technological training in the application of chemistry to common household arts. Such 

 applications are cooking, preserving of fruits, utilization of materials usually wasted, cleans- 

 ing by acids and soaps, bleaching, dyeing, manufacture of soaps of different kinds, disin- 

 fection, fermentation, neutralization of poisons. A course of lectures on dairying is already 

 given each year by the professor of agricultural chemistry. 



AGRICULTURAL. 



But whatever departments may hereafter find a place here, the college has endeavored to 

 be truly and emphatically agricultural. With its limited means, any additional school would 

 have been poorly provided for. Besides, as a school of agriculture, it is yet far from perfect. 

 A wide spread distrust of it as a probable center of book-farming, a disbelief amongst a wide 

 class of the better educated in all attempts to return a man from a college to a farm, the 

 annual appeal for assistance from the State, all together, have compelled to a system of be- 

 stowing on the college an amount insufficient to carry on any technological school of high 

 merit. The intention of successive legislatures, that of 1873 excepted, has been to help it 

 simply to live until its fund should support it. Estimates for the purchase of stock, or im- 

 plements, or books, or for a professorship of chemical physics, of mathematics, or of me- 

 chanics, and surveying, and rural engineering, or of political economy and history, or of 

 geology, or veterinary, are reduced to a minimum or generally stricken out altogether before 

 applying for aid. 



I do not complain of this, I only state it. But it was hardly worth while to enter on new 

 fields before the one we cultivate has put on the comeliness of vigor and healthy growth. 

 In every vote in the House in previous years, more farmers have voted for the college than 

 against it, and the college hopes through tbe efforts of farmers and all interested in educa- 

 tion, to become just what is needed as a professional school of agriculture, and then to have 

 their hearty confidence and support. 



GROWTH SLOW. 



The growth has doubtless been slow. Professors of agriculture, agricultural chemistry, 

 and horticulture had to be made, or rather in the face of adverse criticism, with every failure 

 through inexperience open to the world to make themselves. Text books were not. The 

 schools were filled with teachers who, coming from other institutions, turned their pupils' 

 ambition to the halls they had left. The course, devoid of classics, crowded with science, 

 compelling to manual labor, and long, was repulsive to many. And I have known students 

 coming to college in the spring, hearing of doubts as to whether appropriations would be 

 made, to determine that they could not afford the considerable expenses of -starting out in 

 such uncertainties, pack their goods and return to their homes. 



COURSE OF STUDY. 



The course of instruction at our Agricultural College should be such as to make good far- 

 mers, or at least put the students and graduates in the way of becoming such. Let us turn 

 our attention first to the indoor course of instruction. 1 believe the law is right in its re- 

 quirements for admission. This is as follows: "No student shall be admitted to the in- 

 stitution who is not fifteen years of age, and who does not pass a satisfactory examination 

 in arithmetic, geography, grammar, reading, spelling, and penmanship." These branches 



