STATE POMOLOGICAI, SOCIETY. Ill 



progress that had been made in horticultural lines, and I think 

 if you were to look over the factors that have contributed to that 

 great progress, you would find that progress was due largely to 

 the State Colleges, the Experiment Stations, the Farmers' Insti- 

 tutes, the United States Department of Agriculture, the State 

 Departments of Agriculture throughout the United States and 

 the agricultural press. I only wish that Dr. Fellows, the dis- 

 tinguished president of the University, was here to bring you 

 greetings from that institution. But I will say that I bring you 

 the greetings of the institution and with it a number of students 

 that I am sure will be a surprise to most of you. There will be 

 in the catalogue that is now in the hands of the printer 788 

 students this year in that institution. And what is more, I 

 would like to say before you representative men and women 

 that 90 of those students are catalogued in the College of Agri- 

 culture, a somewhat larger number than was there a few years 

 ago. I don't know whether Mr. Hixon is here or not, but if 

 he is I would like to say to him, and I would like to say to all 

 of you that we who are laboring along agricultural educational 

 lines are glad to have men from other states come to recognize 

 our work as Mr. Hixon did yesterday, and if Mr. Hixon had 

 asked for a show of hands in this audience as to whether there 

 were men who had sons in that institution studying agriculture, 

 he would have seen more than one hand raised. If he had asked 

 of the ladies if there were any here who had daughters, he would 

 have seen at least one hand raised, for I know the mother of 

 one young lady who is taking agriculture was here yesterday. 

 I think that is a good indication. 



I don't know that I could do anything better in speaking for 

 the College of Agriculture of the University of Maine, than to 

 tell you very briefly what we are doing or trying to do at the 

 present time to directly help the farmer. The main idea in our 

 agricultural education used to be to teach courses of different 

 lengths in the colleges. That idea has changed somewhat. 

 President Gibbs of the New Hampshire Agricultural College 

 last spring in a conference in progress in Boston, said that the 

 greatest problem of the agricultural college today was how to 

 help the farmers. Now we at the University of Maine recog- 

 nize the duty we owe to the farmers of the State as well as to the 



