368 HIGHER AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. 



ology, vegetable physiology and zoology, .veterinary science, and 

 study of forest trees and their uses. There } ou will find in the high 

 est departments, sons of the gentry, fitting themselves for the general 

 management of estates ; ambitious young men from the middle 

 classes, fitting themselves for stewards ; and lower down the sons of 

 peasants, between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, who wish to 

 become familiar with the routine of farm work, and who spend three 

 or four hours in study, and the rest in actual labor. Any one can 

 have instructions in the special subjects taught. Besides, there is a 

 course of three weeks of public school vacation in which common 

 school teachers are posted up in the general principles of agriculture 

 an example worthy of imitation. 



Nor i* this all that those governments are doing for this branch 

 of industry. Scattered around in various neighborhoods, are what 

 are called experimental stations, where twelve to twenty acres are 

 divided into small sections for experiments in fertilizers, rotation of 

 crops, with a chemical laboratory and professor attached, and ac 

 commodations for animals, that questions of breeding, feeding and 

 fattening may be settled. These are nurseries for professors in the 

 secondary schools, which are supported by government. Equally 

 thorough and comprehensive are the &quot; building schools&quot; in Prussia. 

 At Holzminden, one of these has five hundred pupils ; and at Nein- 

 berg, in Hanoverian Prussia, is one of the same grade for machinists 

 and millwrights, masons, carpenters and joiners, cabinet-makers and 

 locksmiths. France, before the war, had taken the lead in technical 

 education. There was hardly a town which had not its school of de 

 sign ; and even in Great Britain from ninety thousand to one hun 

 dred thousand pupils are annually receiving this kind of instruction. 



But it is from Russia, who has been making such immense ad 

 vances in developing all her resources, that we might draw the most 

 striking example for imitation. In 1856 she founded the Imperial 

 Agricultural Institute at Gorigoritz, embracing primary, interme 

 diate, and superior departments. Then rapidly followed the creation 

 of numerous establishments for the production of silk, with depart 

 ments for instruction in the art; schools of horticulture, farm 

 schools, model farms, special schools for the culture of flax, all dis 

 tributed with a liberality almost profuse, over the vast territory of 

 the empire, according to the nature of the soil and climate, and the 

 habit and needs of the people. Then followed in quick succession 

 the great agricultural museum at St. Petersburg, with numerous 

 smaller ones in various parts of the country ; schools in Bessarabia, 

 in Caucasia, and, last of all, the great Academy of Agriculture and 

 Forestry near Moscow, to which the government makes an annual 

 appropriation of $100,000. In Caucasia the tuition is not only made 

 free, but small incomes are secured to meet the expenses of students. 

 At Tiflis they have a school for teaching the applications of science 

 to horticulture, arboriculture, bee, vine and silk culture, where they 

 give board, lodging, clothing, and books to a limited number of pu 

 pils, with $40 for the first year, $64 for the second, $72 for the third, 

 and $80 for the fourth and last year ; and all this does not adequately 

 illustrate the spirit and energy with which the government is push 

 ing forward the noble work of educating the agricultural classes. 



