Il6 MICHIGAN STATE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 



The conditions which have been less favorable to agricultural 

 education are now, happily, disappearing and there can be no 

 doubt that the agricultural courses in the land-grant colleges are 

 soon to become quite as popular, attractive, and effective as 

 those in engineering; a situation which I am sure will be wel- 

 comed by everyone who desires to see these colleges fulfilling 

 their original purpose to the highest possible degree. 



In endeavoring to trace the development and present status 

 of these engineering schools, one soon is impressed with the fact 

 that he is dealing with practically the whole history of engineer- 

 ing instruction in America, and, next, he realizes that this record 

 constitutes an important part of the world's progress in this field. 

 In fact in the essential development of engineering education the 

 land-grant colleges, in their various forms of organization, have 

 always been foremost and in the aggregate are today the prin- 

 cipal exponents of this phase of education. 



Systematic instruction in engineering science is a recent 

 thing; it is a constituent part of the remarkable development 

 of industrial and technological training which is recognized as 

 the principal educational event of the last half-century. It is 

 true that some isolated and vague experiments in this field were 

 undertaken nearly a hundred years ago, but an estimate of the 

 scope and value of these efforts may be had by considering how 

 imperfect was the existing knowledge of pure science until well 

 into the nineteenth century, while the applications of these 

 sciences to the arts and industries were scarcely recognized, much 

 less organized into any pedagogical system, until very recently. 

 With two or three exceptions 1 there was in America no organized 

 attempt at engineering instruction prior to the Civil War. Con- 

 temporaneous with, or following, this period came three epoch- 

 making events, each of which was in itself of great importance but 

 which, in conjunction, have wrought an extraordinary national 



1 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, founded in 1824; the Lawrence Scien- 

 tific School, in 1846; the Sheffield Scientific School, in 1847. 



