THE STUDY OF HORTICULTURE IN rUHLIC SCHOOLS. 127 



some of the establishments which we have visited, of dividiug the 

 pupils, for garden work, into several groups. Each group, 

 instead of devoting itself to labor without a result, continues to 

 the end the kind of cultivation which it has commenced. It 

 passes then to a different kind of cultivation, and follows this, 

 too, from the sowing of the seed to the harvest. Following this 

 course each group, during the three years' study, can become 

 acquainted with all the processes relating to the cultivation of the 

 difTerent products of the market garden. 



" This important question has been discussed b}^ the commission : 

 Shall the professor of agriculture be asked to consider horticulture, 

 properly so called, as annexed to his course, or must the teaching 

 of horticulture be given to a special teacher? The decision was 

 unanimous for the second plan, for this reason : many teachers of 

 agriculture, very able as agriculturists and as chemists, cannot 

 give good instruction in horticulture ; they have never thoroughly 

 studied it ; they have never practised it. The pruning and train- 

 ing of trees is known to them only in theory ; market gardening is 

 but little less strange. Their only resource, if required to give 

 this instruction, would be to place a book in the hands of the 

 pupil, and to explain the book. The final, inevitable result would 

 be that instruction in horticulture, which we wish to see prosper in 

 the Normal schools, would be sacrificed. 



"Hence, w^e demand that a master-gardener be attached to each 

 Normal school." 



The school study of agriculture and horticulture is not peculiar 

 to France among the continental nations, but in several others it 

 receives prominent recognition, how^ever strange this may seem to 

 America. 



In this we have another illustration of our educational poverty 

 as regards our contributions to educational theory and practice. 

 Manual training in our schools took its real start from the exhibit 

 of the Moscow^ Technical School at Philadelphia in 1876, the 

 great value of the theory and method of which was at once recog- 

 nized by President Runkle, of your Institute of Technology, and 

 others ; for the present form of manual training in the common 

 school we look to Sweden, and the adaptation of the Swedish 

 " .Sloyd" to the primary school is now brought to us by two sisters 

 — one I believe in Chicago and one in Boston — from Helsingfors 

 in far away Finland. 



