No. i.] AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE. 245 



Knowlton and a host of others, who with self-sacrifice and 

 with money carried this school through its trying years and 

 established it forever. Better had it been wrested from us 

 by the State in 79, than that we, the Board of Agriculture, 

 should allow, or that any of those who have received its 

 benefits should, perhaps with the misguided zeal of an alma 

 mater love, take from it its noblest and most distinctive 

 word, "Agriculture." Such a change would at once termi- 

 natc our peculiar relation as a board with this college. Its 

 president could not again welcome us in the words I have 

 quoted. It would be no more to us than Amherst or the 

 School of Technology. It would be forgetting the intent 

 and purpose of the land grant by which these colleges were 

 established. They were established for the specific purpose 

 of educating the people in the science and practice of agri- 

 culture and the mechanic arts. In most of the States the 

 entire fund was given to one institution, and separate schools 

 of agriculture and the mechanic arts were established. But 

 in Massachusetts the fund was divided, one-third to the 

 Massachusetts Institute of Technology and two-thirds to the 

 Massachusetts Agricultural College, and the State has since 

 generously made appropriations for the support and main- 

 tenance of both these institutions. 



The wisdom of this arrangement is shown when we con- 

 sider that both these schools stand in the front rank of all 

 the schools and colleges in the country in their respective 

 lines of work. The Massachusetts Agricultural College is a 

 distinctively technical school, — of the same class as the 

 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, — for the education 

 of the agricultural classes in the science and practice of 

 agriculture. 



The successful practice of any of the various lines of agri- 

 culture or horticulture requires the broadest and most 

 thorough education of any industrial calling; and the ex- 

 tent and value of the agricultural interests in Massachu- 

 setts are of sufficient importance to warrant and demand 

 that at least one well-endowed and well-equipped institu- 

 tion within the State devote its efforts distinctively to the 

 education and advancement of agricultural knowledge, and 

 that the work be carried on as thoroughly and as dis- 



