PERIODICAL LITERATURE 83 



scribers are published. The most important of these are reviewed 

 from time to time in the Experiment Station Record of the United 

 States Department of Agriculture (17) and need not be men- 

 tioned here except in this general way. On the whole, agricultural! 

 periodicals have maintained too conservative an attitude toward 

 agricultural education, both as to colleges, and to elementary 

 and secondary schools. One cannot avoid the suspicion that this 

 attitude on the part of some of these publications is not wholly 

 disinterested. Agricultural education would, among other 

 things, most certainly develop more critical readers, and this 

 would soon react upon the circulation or upon the character of 

 the matter published. Again, the fear of offending some of their 

 readers, thus affecting circulation, makes the publishers cautious 

 in giving space to views that might unsettle the faith of the 

 fathers in the little one-room school. 



Occasionally a well-written article on agricultural education 

 appears in the more special periodicals. For example, in a maga- 

 zine "devoted to the philosophy of science" we find a discussion 

 of "Agriculture the Basis of Education" (118). The writer 

 regards the two primal contacts of the child, with nature and 

 with parents, as more fundamental than all questions of subject- 

 matter and methods of formal education. "The mental con- 

 ditions of agriculture are just as essential to normal development 

 of the human mind as air, food, and exercise for the development 

 of the human body." He refers to the education of the 

 early Greeks in support of his views: "The young Greek of 

 the Homeric age appears to have had much more intimate and 

 adequate contacts with nature and with his elders than our 

 modern education provides, or even permits." 



A similar conclusion as to the educational influence of agri- 

 culture, though discussed from an entirely different standpoint, 

 is found in an article on "Farm Life as a Basis of Practical 

 Education" (119). The subject for another discussion is the 

 "Need for Agricultural Education" (120). The economic im- 



