70 Agricultural Instruction in the Public High Schools 



did not seem to be working much. We found some green plant 

 lice on a corn leaf, some with wings. A s'.nall stalk of corn 

 that had an ant hill at the base, was pulled up by the roots 

 and it was found that all the dirt had been worked away from 

 them. The corn-root aphis were thick on the roots. They 

 were a greenish color. We shook them and some ants off on 

 the ground. The ants began carrying them away immediately. 



Certainly such work as indicated in these students' notes will 

 not suffer by comparison with that of high-school classes spend- 

 ing their time on planarian worms, campanularion hydroids, and 

 holothurians, all of which the writer has seen studied i,ooo 

 miles from the sea coast. The eighth grade of a prominent 

 eastern school system during the past year began the study of 

 a series of animal types with the amoeba. 



The principal of this interesting school, Mr. McNeil C. James,' 

 is a graduate of Illinois Normal University, at Normal, and 

 had, at the time of my visit, partly completed the course in 

 agriculture at the University of Illinois. He later returned to 

 the University and graduated with the class of 1909. He had 

 prepared himself more especially along the line of agronomy. 

 His successor, a graduate of the Northern Illinois Normal 

 School, at DeKalb, took courses in animal husbandry at the 

 summer session of the University last year, so as to be able to 

 present that work to the two classes who had already taken 

 the agronomy and horticulture. The assistant principal has 

 studied at the University of Chicago and has had special train- 

 ing in domestic science at Teachers College, New York. By 

 introducing a certain amount of departmental teaching in the 

 grades, the principal has been able, with a small teaching force 

 to give his school some of the advantages of larger schools with 

 teachers especially prepared along certain lines. 



Besides a fair amount of general apparatus, the school pos- 

 sessed special one-inch glass tubing for soil tests, two-inch 

 metallic tubes with sealed and with perforated bottoms, larger 

 galvanized iron vessels holding definite amounts of earth, and 

 other equipment for soil investigations. An orchard of twenty- 



' Mr. James now has charge of agricultural work in the Valley City 

 (N. D.) State Normal School. 



