STUDENTS OF AGRICULTURE. 47 



was so necessary ? Are they coming from the law schools, the 

 schools of medicine, or the commercial schools ? Are they 

 coming from Harvard College ? Is there a professorship of 

 agriculture there ? Pray tell us where they are to come from. 

 They have got to be made, like the teachers of every other 

 science. We have got the machinery to manufacture them, and 

 all we want is to put it at work. We cannot, of course, start 

 oif in an agricultural course as Harvard College does in its 

 literary course, but we can make a beginning. The only con- 

 clusion to which I can come, is that we can never have these 

 desirable teachers and scientific lecturers unless we have some 

 special school for their instruction ; and I do not know of any 

 special school better adapted to furnish the community with that 

 very necessary class of men which the ex-governor considers 

 indispensable, than the very college which he says is a failure 

 and must be abandoned. I would like to have the ex-governor 

 explain how he would get these teachers, unless we have some 

 college to make them. 



Again, he said that the graduates of the Agricultural College 

 would not find remunerative employment. I ask, what literary 

 labor, what scientific labor, is in greater demand, and what men 

 enjoy wider fame or are more extensively read, than men deeply 

 versed both in the science and practice of agriculture ? I know 

 no literary labor, no scientific attainments, that can command 

 better prices than attainments in agricultural science and prac- 

 tical agriculture. I was surprised that a gentleman who had 

 been so highly honored in Massachusetts should make a speech 

 so well becoming the dark ages. 



Professor Agassiz. Mr. Meriam made one remark to which 

 I should like to reply. I believe that a negative result never 

 destroys a positive experiment. The influence ^of a first copu- 

 lation has been tested in so many cases, that the absence of 

 such influence, even in a great many cases, would not show 

 that it does not occur. Of course, when it is affirmed (an^ I 

 will presently give the facts on which the assertion rests,) that 

 the first copulation has an influence upon the character of the 

 following generation, it is not maintained that fecundation is 

 done forever in that first connection of the sexes, or that what- 

 ever copulations may take place afterwards are to be always 

 influenced by that, but it has been ascertained in so many 



