AGRICULTURAL COLLEGES. 11 



he looked so small and slight that I told him I thought our work would 

 be too heavy for him. He begged to be allowed to try. He was started 

 at $3. 00 per week, but before he was twenty years of age, his energy, 

 intelligence and untiring industry made his services so valuable, that I 

 paid him a salary of $1,200 per year, which was more than I paid my 

 foreman, a man of forty, who had been at the business for twenty years. 

 But I could not keep the young man even at that. He had saved 

 money enough to start on his own account, and is now on the straight 

 road to fortune. But there are few similar cases in nay experience of 

 over twenty years with such youths. I have only had one other in- 

 stance of the kind, but many of them have made fairly successful 

 business men, and scores of graduates from our establishment are 

 now engaged in the florist and market garden business in all parts of 

 the country. 



Q. "What is your opinion of the value of agricultural colleges, Mr. 

 Henderson, as training schools in the branches of farming or gar- 

 dening? 



A. I am afraid my opinion is too pronounced on this subject to be 

 agreeable to the directors of some of these institutions. That they 

 might be made the very best mediums for such a purpose I have 

 not the least doubt, if the directors would only be convinced that the 

 superintendents, to be successful, must have an actual practical 

 working experience varied and extended enough to make them 

 masters of the subject. But thus far I have good reason to believe 

 that few of them have such men. The great trouble is that they 

 fritter away the time of the students on abstruse and practically use- 

 less theoretical studies, wasting life in attempting to get at the often 

 doubtful causes for the attainment of important results in the so- 

 called science of " agriculture ; which, after all, with all the help of 

 Liebig, and other such men, is almost entirely ignored by the 

 farmers and gardeners who are the kings in those industries to-day 

 both in Europe and America. 



I will here repeat the views I expressed in the Enrol New Yorker 

 in May, 1883, in a discussion of this question. 



" The longer I live, the less I believe in the value attached to the so- 

 called science of agriculture. I believe that a fairly educated youth 

 would have far better chances for success in life if the four or six 

 years spent under the different professors of an agricultural college 

 (as they are generally conducted) were spent in actual work of ten 

 hours a day in a well conducted farm or garden. The work might 

 not be so pleasant, and his manners might not have the polish that 

 friction with scholastic minds might give, but he would be better 

 fitted for the battle of life. 



