MUSEUM OP COMPARATIVE ANATOMY. 41 



there, the working rooms are there, the materials for examina- 

 tion are there ; and you could send any number of pupils to be 

 instructed there, and they would receive their education free of 

 all charges — for those are the terms on which I receive the 

 students who come there. 



Now, I think it is worth while for the State Board of Agricul- 

 ture to consider whether it will not encourage the founding 

 there of specialprofessorships for those departments which are 

 needed to be taught in our agricultural colleges, and thus build 

 a nursery which shall prepare all the teachers we want, which 

 we have not got, and cannot get, and which we ought to educate 

 at home. 



This is a mere appeal to your sympathy, and I think that the 

 institution in behalf of which I have made that appeal, deserves 

 that sympathy ; and I think that it is the only institution in the 

 country where such a thing can be done with a chance of 

 success, because it has all the appliances needed, but it has not 

 an income sufficient to connect with its present operations that 

 of teaching, in the way in which teaching should be done, for 

 agricultural purposes. The purely scientific purposes for which 

 it was especially founded are there carried on, and it requires 

 only some such extension in order to give it that practical 

 capability which would foster the progress of agriculture in the 

 various directions in which natural history is necessarily 

 connected with agriculture. 



And let me add one word of a general character. I am fully 

 aware that agriculture needs no science, because men have 

 cultivated the soil before science existed. All antiquity raised 

 domestic animals, and plants which served as food, before the 

 raising of any of these things had been worked up into a scien- 

 tific form ; and therefore, any scientific institution, or any 

 individual who claims that science is absolutely necessary to 

 carry on these operations, would be guilty of an unwarrantable 

 exaggeration. But then, it is equally true, that agriculture 

 has made, under the influence of science, such progress, that 

 in our days of rapid movementj the community cannot afford 

 to discard scientific progress, and science will contribute to the 

 improvement of all departments of human activity ; and i4 is 

 just that beneficial influence that I should like to see penetrate 

 rapidly and more extensively all branches of practical business, 

 6 



