428 MASS. BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



President Hitchcock. — I fully agree, sir, with the remarks 

 which have been made by his excellency, and other gentlemen 

 whom I have heard to-day, on the importance of using other 

 means for promoting agriculture, besides establishing a school or 

 schools. I hope no gentleman will imagine that the establish- 

 ment of a school, however judicious a plan is adopted, is going 

 at once to make any great change in our agriculture. It is 

 only one of the means which are employed in Europe for that 

 pur[)ose. I am not going to compare the means. I do believe 

 that agricultural societies are indispensable. It is one of the 

 reasons why I could wish to see schools established, that they 

 may form a channel by which we may communicate with the 

 agricultural world, by which we can receive information of 

 what is doing in other parts of the world, of what is doing in 

 the cultivation of land, in the raising of stock, and in a multi- 

 tude of subjects connected with agriculture. If you had a 

 school, it would be a channel through which there would come 

 this information ; and it would be a sort of ordeal to pass 

 through. 



Now there comes floating somehow or other on the winds, 

 an account of an improvement in agriculture. An individual 

 farmer hears of it, and undertakes to make the experiment. 

 He fails, perhaps. Then he is disgusted with everything of 

 the kind. Now one grand object of a school of this kind, is to 

 try experiments, to try suggestive experiments. For it is an 

 indispensable adjunct of all the schools in Europe that I visited, 

 with the exception of only one in Edinburgh, that they should 

 have a farm connected with the school ; that they should live 

 upon the farm ; that the professors and officers, at least a part 

 of them, — those who have the management of the whole con- 

 cern, — should engage in actual labor on that farm. Some of 

 them do not do it for wages, and some do. But they all engage, 

 more or less, in the duties of the farm, in the work on the farm, 

 and in every kind of work, too. Even those who do not ex- 

 pect to labor in after-life, but who expect to have the superin- 

 tendence of the labor of others, all go through the work. 



I have mentioned in this report, the case of a school in 

 France about twenty-five miles from Paris, where the director 



