16 



should be taken up into the plant and cast off into the clouds to be 

 returned again as rain. What has been the result? The rainfall has 

 been diminished, the showers which heaven still does not refuse to 

 furnish, instead of being welcomed by the soft verdure of forests 

 and cultivated fields and lovingly kept in the soil for the good of all 

 animal and plant life, is repelled by parched hill sides, so that it 

 shoots off in angry torrents and is soon once more in the lakes and the 

 great rivers and the oceans beyond. Thus by a perfectly explicable 

 method our climate is undergoing a change and it is the change which 

 in some of the regions of the old world has caused the sands to drift 

 over regions that were once the homes of a prosperous people. 



And yet however great the difficulties may seem, there is no ten- 

 dencv of nature that is more amenable to the influence of man's ap- 

 preciative intelligence. Everybody remembers Emerson's allusion to 

 the ability of the English by the planting of trees on the borders of 

 Egypt to bring rain again after a drought of three thousand years. 

 We have been doing the same thing in the West ; for the planting of 

 trees and cornfields in Kansas and Nebraska up to the very frontier 

 has already pushed the rain-line further west by more than a hundred 

 miles. The Reports of the Commissioner of Agriculture are teem- 

 ing with facts of similar significance. It is estimated, for example, 

 that the loss from the swine plague alone reaches annually some thir- 

 ty millions of dollars, and that the value of corn and wheat annually 

 destroyed by fungi is not less than the enormous sum of two hundred 

 millions.* 



These are some of the lessons and some of the necessities that are 

 taught by experience ; and yet they are only hints, as it were, de- 

 signed to show how vast is the domain that invites the careful study 

 of our schools and colleges. It is into this domain that the people 

 were invited by the wise Land Grant of 1862. It is in this domain 

 that the colleges and universities founded on that grant, if they live 

 up to their high behest, will accomplish results that shall be for the 

 helping, if not for the healing of the nation. 



* Report of Commissioner of Agriculture for 1886, pp. 11, 24. 



