26 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



Again, if there were a well-defined science of agriculture, 

 it would not in itself constitute a complete industrial educa- 

 tion. We might, even now, do what some of the frequent 

 contributors to the agricultural papers seem to demand, and 

 give instruction beginning, say, with the method of cutting 

 and carrving wood for the kitchen fire. Then we might 

 proceed to show how to handle a shovel, a spade, a two- 

 tined fork and a four-tined one, and so on. But it is hardly 

 probable that boys would go to a college, or whatever the 

 institution might be called, to learn that which they are not 

 too willing to practise at home, where they have, at least, 

 board and washing and clothes furnished them. As in the 

 case with trade schools, the agricultural college can justify 

 its being, not by giving the training which might have been 

 given on the home farm, nor yet by compressing that same 

 training into fewer years, but by adding to it something which 

 shall tend to make the student a better farmer, a better man 

 and a better citizen on his farm. It was profound wisdom 

 which united the mechanic arts with agriculture in the 

 fundamental law establishins^ the various colleges. Where 

 there are institutions designed to be exchisively agricultural, 

 as in Massachusetts, the same advantage is gained by broaden- 

 ing the course of study so that it shall embrace many branches 

 which are general rather than technical. These studies bene- 

 fit the agricultural course from the fact that they are not 

 themselves agricultural. They make it possible for the 

 student to gain that personal development which makes for 

 general fitness rather than for special aptitude. And they 

 also ally the more specifically agricultural studies with other 

 studies which have a teaching form already fixed. It would 

 be no benefit to agriculture if we could succeed in forcing an 

 institution to cut out everything in its curriculum which is 

 not directly and immediately technical. No more deadly 

 blow could he struck at the agriculture of the future than 

 would be struck if such a movement should be made uni- 

 versal or even general. Technical education as api^lied to 

 agriculture is incomplete so far as it is exclusive ; it needs, 

 as other branches of technical education do not in the same 

 degree, the help of other studies technical or general. For, 

 lacking the form of progressive sequence, it lacks the first 



