268 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



devote himself to the application of those principles hj prac- 

 tical labor on a suitable farm or farms for one or more years, 

 or till he becomes efficient in the manipulations. This course 

 will be seen, on reflection, to be closely analogous to our 

 present most approved modes of acquiring a thorough knowl- 

 edge of law, medicine and divinity. 



Suppose a young man wants to become a lawyer. Is it 

 better to go first into the office of some successful man in large 

 practice, where he must fall at once into the routine of office 

 work, filling out forms, copying writs, looking up titles, and a 

 thousand other details, or to study a year or two at a law 

 school, under the guidance and instruction of the highest lights 

 in the profession, where he will see little of the details of prac- 

 tice, to be sure, but where he can hardly fail, if he has any 

 application at all, to obtain a widely extended general view of 

 the great principles which underlie the whole structure of the 

 profession, and where he can occupy himself " in tracing out 

 the originals, and, as it were, the elements of the law," and 

 afterwards go into an office and become familiar with the routine 

 of practice ? 



Some would answer in one way, no doubt, and others in 

 another. Some might regard the time at the law school as 

 comparatively thrown away; others would esteem it as of the 

 utmost importance. The latter would justify it by saying that 

 the broad groundwork of general principles which the scliool 

 would give the young man, would be of untold value in all the 

 emergencies of after practice, while, ten chances to one, if he 

 began with the details of practice, he would never rise to gen- 

 eral principles. In the former case, after becoming familiar 

 with general principles, a familiarity with practice must be 

 obtained, as a matter of course, as every thing depends upon it. 



It would be unfair, I think, to assert that the advocates of 

 university teaching in Germany undervalue practice. If I 

 understand their position, it is that the union of the highest 

 education in the sciences and in the practice, is incompatible 

 at the same time and in the same school, and they advise the 

 pupil to begin at the fountain head and become well grounded 

 in the scientific principles, and then to go on to a farm under 

 a competent, practical man, and learn the details of farm 

 management. 



