No. 4.] NEW ENGLAND AGRICULTURE. 115 



mended. Publishers are willing to furnish these books to 

 such readers at a considerable reduction from the usual list 

 price, and the instruction and examinations are given by cor- 

 respondence. The numl)er of such readers is already more 

 tlian fifteen hundred, and is rai)i(lly increasing. 



But there is another means of agricultural education, or, 

 more properly speaking, of education in agricultural com- 

 munities, which, as it seems to me, might be and ought to 

 be generally adoi)ted, and which, if once put into successful 

 operation, would have extremely important and far-reaching 

 results. I mean the introduction into the rural schools of a 

 careful, systematic, progressive and thoroughly competent 

 teaching of the elementary facts of natural history and the 

 elementary principles of the natural sciences. The children 

 of these communities are constantly surrounded with the 

 material conditions which form the basis of such instruction, 

 but, for want of the simplest training in a habit of accurate 

 observation, they grow up like the blind in the midst of a 

 world of beauty or the deaf in the midst of a world of 

 melody — Seeing, they perceive not; and hearing, they do 

 not understand. I do not underestimate the importance and 

 even the necessit}' of a knowledge of the "three R's;" but 

 the most of that knowledge, after the first processes have 

 been learned, can be acquired incidentally ; and it seems to 

 me nothing less than a wicked waste of time and an unpar- 

 donable wrong to the children that they should be compelled, 

 winter after winter and summer after summer, to 2^0 throu":h 

 the varying stages of the same treadmill routine, at an age 

 when their minds are huno-erino; and thirstinof for knowledire, 

 when all their faculties are alert and eager with inquisitive 

 curiosity, when their whole intellectual and moral being is 

 more plastic to permanent impressions than at any later 

 period of life, and when the world of animate and inanimate 

 nature about them overflows with the means of satisfying 

 their natural craving. I cannot dwell upon this topic, and 

 I am well aware that it is beset with difiiculties, — the ffreat- 

 est difficulty of all probably being the lack of properly 

 equipped teachers. But when once the State makes up its 

 mind that this kind of teaching shall be given, and is will- 

 ing to pay its teachers in the elementary and district schools 



