Problems of Instruction in the Secondary School 163 



to rural communities, whether pertaining to plants, engineering, 

 soil formation, or meteorology. No doubt it is the facility with 

 which agriculture has lent itself to this elementary science idea 

 that has made it so popular as a first-year subject, where it 

 manifestly could not become very technical. Given in the first 

 year it must of necessity be largely cultural in its effect. It 

 furnishes the opportunity for an introduction to the simplest 

 chemical phenomena, combustion, solution, neutralization of 

 acids in soil, the nature of nitrogen, of the meaning of the term 

 protein, salts, and numerous other terms that any farmer must 

 be slightly acquainted with in order to read intelligently his farm 

 journal or the government bulletins, and which he may never 

 hear of as a boy if they are left buried in a formal third- or 

 fourth-year study. 



The combinations of studies listed in Chapter IV are sug- 

 gestive of the trend toward the use of a body of fairly simple 

 facts and phenomena to fulfil such a function as just men- 

 tioned. Where once physical geography was expected to do 

 this, we now find it combined with a half-year of agriculture. 

 Unfortunately there is little evidence that the physical geography 

 is modified at all by the relationship. At other times we find 

 the popular combination of botany (flower study) in fall and 

 spring, with agriculture (experimental work) in the winter. 

 Undoubtedly the most efficient arrangement will result from a 

 breaking up of the rather divergent lines of agriculture studies, 

 so that plant work, such as the study of field, orchard, and 

 garden crops, may be intimately taught with the principles of 

 botany, when feeds and fertilizers will be integral parts of 

 chemistry, when the cream separator will be the starting point 

 of centrifugal action instead of the end, if indeed, the machine 

 is not ignored altogether. The university botanist and chemist 

 might not recognize their children in such a grouping, but the 

 children would no doubt be lustier and grow to be more useful 

 by the arrangement. This grouping will possibly grow more 

 frequent as the " introductory science " comes more and more 

 to be presented in the seventh and eighth grades of consolidated 

 or village schools. Likewise the arrangement, not infrequently 

 used, of this general course in agriculture in the fourth year, 



