SEMI-CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION 91 



affording an opportunity for students who desired it to teach a 

 district school in winter. As will be seen, the entrance to the 

 college classes was easy and of low standing. There was only 

 one laboratory, and that was for chemistry in the north end of 

 CoUege Hall. 



In 1870 it was not difficult to plan a course of study for an 

 agricultural college. Except some points gathered from man- 

 ual labor, which were not numerous nor very important, the 

 students received, all told, eight weeks of daily work in horti- 

 culture and ten weeks in agriculture, and these topics were 

 chiefly taught by the slow process of lectures. There were few 

 books and papers to aid students in their pursuit of agriculture. 

 The College was in the woods, so to speak, with no model to 

 follow. Nowhere in this broad country were students taught 

 advanced stock judging, stock feeding, the examination of 

 dressed meats, soil physics, dairying, plant breeding, plant 

 histology, ecology, plant pathology, the critical study of grasses, 

 weeds, or trees, plant physiology, farm economics, the growing 

 of forest trees, spraying for insects and fungus. Bacteriology as 

 related to animals, dairying, soils, and plants was a sealed book. 



The College had been started long before there was much 

 demand for it by the best of farmers. This was due to the per- 

 sistence of John C. Holmes, then secretary of the State Agri- 

 cultural Society, more than to all other persons combined. 

 Inaugurated under such conditions, adverse criticism was inevi- 

 table. Newspapers gave the College plenty of negative or left- 

 hand advertising. For many years the only advertisements 

 paid for was a part of a page in the Michigan Almanac. As 

 late as 1870, the College had little contact with farmers by way 

 of institutes or extension correspondence. 



A few staunch men stood nobly by the College, notable among 

 whom was Hon. Jonathan J. Woodman, afterward master of the 

 State Grange and later master of the National Grange. From 

 1869 to 187 1 he was speaker of the House of Representatives 



