88 MONTHLY JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURE. 



AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. 



ACCUMULATING SIGNS IN FAVOR OF A GENERAL SYSTEM OF APPROPRIATE EDUCATION 

 FOR AGRICULTURISTS— VOICE OF '• THE CULTIVATOR." 



We copy with inexpressible pleasure the follovsring from the last Albany Cul- 

 tivator. The deservedly wide circulation and influence of that journal will 

 materially assist in the consummation of what every man of discernment must 

 see is indispensably necessary to push the improvement of Agriculture to that 

 pitch which other arts have reached, and reached only by bringing Science to 

 bear on their progress and development. The people are rousing up to a sense 

 of the " fixed fact " that while they are taxed some ten or twenty millions a 

 year for the support of armies and navies, and for illustrations and instruction 

 to advance military science, they have a right to insist on retainuig or getting 

 hack a small modicum of the contributions out of their own pockets, for that kind 

 of instruction which will improve them in the practice of that beneficent art 

 which distributes its own abundance and prosperity to every other class of so- 

 ciety. We shall be glad to follow in the wake of the Cultivator, and are not 

 ashamed to cry " Help ! help ! " to every press in the Union, in such a cause. 



The Cultivator is remarking on the Reports of Committees of- the ]New-5^ork 

 Legislature at its late session, pro and con, on " several Petitions presented by 

 the Farmers' Club of the American Institute, asking aid from the State for the 

 establishment of an Agricultural School and Experimental Farm, to be placed 

 ■under the care of the Institute " : 



The Committee, however, recoimnend the 

 study of Agricultm'e by means of books, in 

 the Normal School, and in the academies and 

 local institutions which are already estab- 

 lished and endowed in all parts of the State. 



We do not propose at tliis time to disciLSS 

 the piinciples set forth in either of these Re- 

 ports, but will merely remark that it is grati- 

 fying to see that the agricultural interest is 

 Bteadily and surely advancing to the position 

 ■which it is entitled to hold, and from which 

 it will, at no distant period, exercise its due 

 influence on our legislative councils. The 

 first and principal step toward securing this 

 object is the proper education of the rising 

 generation of agiiculturists. We are confi- 

 aeut that causes are now Li operation which 



As to " the [Normal School," which we suppose to be referred to as "already 

 established " — at Albany, we presume — we can only take time, for the moment, 

 to say that we never experienced half as much pleasure as we did by a visit to 

 it of our own seeking in company with Mr. Randall, now of Virginia. We were 

 penetrated to the soul with the consciousness of the vast importance of the prin- 

 ciple carried out in it ; and we do not see, as we have before said, why it might 

 not be so extended (in connection with a farm where principles should be illus- 

 trated and sustained by practice,) so as to throw a deeper infusion of agricultural 

 science in the Common Schools of the State. 



What would not $100,000 a year accomplish, applied to that object? It would 



(184) 



will ultimately produce the desired result. 

 The language used by Mr. Beckvidth, in 

 closing his Report, happily expresses our own 

 views : 



" We hope the day is not far distant when 

 an mieducated farmer will be as rare a per- 

 son as an uneducated lawyer, physician, or 

 minister. We mean, too, by an education, 

 something more than a knowledge of the 

 mere routine of the farm and farming opei'a- 

 tions ; we mean by the tenn, a mental ti-ain- 

 ing, by which the man who works amid the 

 comjihcated arrangements of the subtle and 

 refined agencies of Natixre, wUl be able to 

 understand those arrangements and give di- 

 rection to the laws wlilch control them." 



