46 TECHNICAL EDUCATION IN TROPICAL AGRICULTURE 



must raise the entrance standard of the students or we 

 must lengthen the course of instruction given, but in 

 both of these cases we shall be met with the difficulty of 

 being unable to offer sufficient employment afterwards 

 to induce candidates to come forward. I have sum- 

 marized the situation in a note which is published in the 

 Proceedings of the Meeting of the Board of Agriculture 

 in India, held at Coimbatore in December, 1913 (published 

 by the Superintendent; Government Printing Press, Cal- 

 cutta, price is. 9d.)- In this note I have shown that the 

 cost of education in the Lyallpur College amounts to 

 something like Rs. 8,000 per licentiate turned out (average 

 of the last three years), and this figure takes into account 

 only the annual recurring expenses of the institute after 

 deducting a very liberal amount for the expenditure in 

 time and money on the research laboratories. It is con- 

 sequently a very expensive system of education, and at 

 the same time is not yielding results proportionate to the 

 cost. I am of opinion that the entire policy of agricul- 

 tural education requires remodelling. In the first place, 

 the results obtained in countries where farming is an 

 important industry, and where large sums of money 

 have been spent on its development, indicate that 

 all attempts at improvement must be based on investi- 

 gation investigation of the causes of sterility, causes of 

 diseases, the effect of climatic conditions, and the possi- 

 bilities of improvement of land, stock, and plants. Such 

 investigations demand a number of experimental stations 

 for experiment and record and well-equipped scientific 

 laboratories, where the necessary scientific inquiries 

 can be carried out. I think we may attribute 

 the high position held in scientific agriculture by the 

 Department of Agriculture in the United States of 

 America to the fact that this broad principle is being 

 followed there, namely, that inquiry has preceded 

 education and instruction. The second point is that 

 experience throughout the world seems to show that 

 technical education given in agricultural colleges to be 

 effective should be of only one or both of the following 

 two types : 



(a) Elementary instruction in the form of short 



