Xo. 4.] AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. 109 



to you a moment ago. Here is an eighty-weeks com'se of 

 agriculture, running over a period of two years ; forty of 

 these weeks are being taught tliis present winter. That is 

 to say, the pupils who are in these courses of agriculture 

 take nothing else ; they are ecjuivalent to the last two years 

 of the high school. This year is being taught twenty 

 weeks of soil, its cultivation and its composition, together 

 Avith some experiments ; also ten weeks on dairying, the 

 types of dairy cows, the foods, the stables, the production 

 of butter and cheese and the use of skim milk, — and the 

 young men expect to utilize as a laboratory the creamery in 

 their town ; and ten weeks of seed, grass and fertility. 

 That is the instruction that is being given this year. I 

 do not commend it, necessarily, but only state it as an illus- 

 tration that somethinof is beino^ done in New York State. 

 The next will be ten weeks on orchards, ten weeks on farm 

 buildings, and twenty weeks on poultry, beef cattle, hogs, 

 sheep and horses. , 



We have also in New York State an academy which has 

 an endowed department of agriculture, — the only endowed 

 department of its kind in the State, as far as I know, in the 

 public schools. It has a four-years course of agriculture, 

 and there arc four terms in the year, running tlirough the 

 sixteen quarters. In the first year the agriculture is geology 

 and farm buildings ; the other subjects are English, arith- 

 metic, physical geography, drawing and the like. The second 

 year the agriculture is in the form of zoology, entomology, 

 dairy husbandry, horticulture, soils and fertilizers, poultry 

 keeping, physics as relating to agriculture, and certain other 

 subjects. 



Now, the difficulty with us in New York State is that our 

 State sylla])us does not include such subjects as these; so 

 that, while these subjects may be introduced in the schools, 

 at the same time they are gratuitous and supplementar}". 

 I think there will be great change soon in that regard. I 

 should not like, as I said before, to see any agriculture 

 forced into any school by mere law. I would like to see 

 the opportunity given whereby nature-study would 1k' taught 

 up to the fifth and sixth grade, we will say ; then let it go 



