398 MONTHLY JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURE. 



New- York is a fit place for a college and for a trial farm;" at all events, there is greai 

 comfort in their declaration, with their opgortunities of judging, that " the useful 

 arts, especially Agriculture, are required by public sentiment to be elevated to 

 their highest possible rank." But, for our humble selves, we confess that reflec- 

 tion would prompt us to locate such a school beyond the contaminating allure- 

 ments and vices of a large city ; nor would we have the course and brai\ches o* 

 instruction, in an Agricultural Institute, connected with the study of any other 

 " arts" or sciences than those which are immediately allied and auxiliary to it, 

 for we should strongly apprehend that, in all such partnerships, these other 

 " arts " would be artful enough to appropriate to themselves the lion's share — 

 taking to themselves, sooner or later, all the choice pieces, and throwing the olfal 

 to the unpretending rustic member of the firm. Thus has it proved, so far, in all 

 that has been done for Education by the Governments, State and Federal, and even 

 in institutions founded on the voluntary contributions of farmers themselves ; for, 

 how little is taught in any of our colleges in direct aid o{ agricultural researches 

 and industry ? We shall soon see what better, if anything, will happen in the 

 arrangements and conduct of an Institution founded on the munificence of a for- 

 eigner (the subject of a great nation for whom we are taught, even from the 

 nursery, to entertain a deadly antipathy), expressly for the " increase and diffu- 

 sion of useful knowledge among men." We may be permitted, however, to say 

 — and we do it with the greatest pleasure — that we have heard enough of his 

 sentiments on the subject to inspire strong hopes that, in the learned Secuetart 

 of the " Smithsonian Institute," Agriculture will have an advocate duly im- 

 pressed with a sense of its paramount importance, and with the exceeding use- 

 fulness of all knowledge that may serve to enlighten its practice in the field, and 

 to place it where it deserves to stand, in the front rank of our industrial occupa- 

 tions. 



Finally, we feel it to be a sort of duty to exhort all those in the several States 

 who take concern in the kindred causes of education and Agriculture, to use their 

 influence to have agricultural books, and branches of study that bear upon Agri- 

 culture, gradually introduced into the schools already in existence. Here a be- 

 ginning may be made. Here, even in the way of amusement, the youngest boys 

 may learn the natural history of all domestic animals — the principles to be con- 

 sulted in all endeavors to modify their forms. Here they may learn, before they 

 set out in life, the natural and commercial history and medical and artistical uses 

 of all grains and plants. In this way the rising generation, instead of wasting 

 their youth in the perusal of trashy old stuff, nonsensical or pernicious, may be 

 so reared as to leave school already endowed with a vast fund of elegant and use- 

 ful knowledge, such as they will never acquire if not inspired in youth with a 

 taste for reading. Every sportsman knows how diflicult, if not impossible, it is 

 to take a lazy old hound, whose habits are fixed, and break him in to be a loader 

 in the chase ! To give him the keenest relish, you must take him out cub-hunt- 

 ing, and let him be " blooded" when young. So must we be blooded, as it were, 

 to the love of that greatest of all blessings, the love of knowledge and of books, 

 when we are young ; and common sense suggests that it should be in the love 

 of the books and the knowledge that will give us pleasure and eflicioncy in the 

 practice of the pursuit by ichich we are to live. The community that neglects 

 this obvious duty to the rising generation deserves the fate of the mother whose 

 son, under the gallows, for her neglect in not punishing his first theft, bit off her 

 ear. 



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