Colleges of Agriculture 165 



affairs of life ; but I fear, however, that in the 

 very prosperity of these redirected institutions 

 there lies danger of undertaking kinds of work 

 that partake overmuch of exploitation. Land 

 and animals and orchards and machines and 

 crops are no longer regarded as mere museums : 

 they are laboratories and laboratory materials 

 to be used for the same purpose and in the 

 same pedagogical spirit as the geologist uses 

 rocks or the chemist uses chemicals and chem- 

 ical problems. We now have class-rooms into 

 which cattle and sheep and other animals may 

 be taken for study. These animals are labora- 

 tory material. If it is worth while to study live 

 bacteria and live insects, it is equally worth 

 while to study live cows. We have studied the 

 fleas and other parasites that infest our domes- 

 tic animals before we have studied the animals 

 themselves, so successfully have we avoided the 

 large and significant things. 



In other words, the spirit of the modern 

 agricultural college is to teach in terms of the 

 actual daily life, making nature and the farm a 

 real part of one's living and the foundation of 



