the establishment of a school, however judicious a plan is adopted, is going 

 at once to make any great change in our agriculture. It is only one of the 

 means which are employed in Europe for that purpose. I am not going to 

 compare the means. I do believe that Agricultural Societies are indispen- 

 sable. It is one of the reasons why I could wish to see schools established, 

 that they may form a channel by which we may communicate with the 

 agricultural world, by which we can receive information of what is doing 

 in other parts of the world, of what is doing in the cultivation of land, in 

 the raising of stock, and in a multitude of subjects connected with agricul- 

 culture. If you had a school, it would be a channel through which there 

 would come this information ; and it would be a sort of ordeal to pass 

 through. 



Now there comes floating somehow or other on the winds, an account of 

 an improvement in agriculture. An individual farmer hears of it, and un- 

 dertakes to make the experiment. He fails perhaps. Then he is disgust- 

 ed with every thing of the kind. Now one grand object of a school of this 

 kind, is to try experiments, to try suggestive experiments. For it is an 

 indispensable adjunct of all the schools in Europe that I visited, with the 

 exception of only one in Edinburgh, that they should have a farm con- 

 nected with the school ; that they should live upon the farm ; that the pro- 

 fessors and officers, at least a part of them, those who have the manage- 

 ment of the whole concern, should engage in actual labor on that farm. 

 Some of them do not do it for wages and some do. But they all engage, 

 more or less, in the duties of the farm, in the work on the farm, and in 

 every kind of work, too. Even those who do not expect to labor in after 

 life, but who expect to have the superintendence of the labor of others, all 

 go through the work. 



I have mentioned in this report the case of a school in France, about 

 twenty-five miles from Paris, where the director of the school, a scien- 

 tific man, conducted us out to the piggery; and there we met the young 

 men connected with the school, evidently from wealthy families, all of 

 them, including the director himself, with their frocks on. But I noticed 

 that all the young men were engaged in some business about the farm. 

 Each one had his duty to perform. One was to attend to such a thing, and 

 another to such a thing. There was one young man who had a broom and 

 a pail of water, and who was cleaning an ox's leg in a stable. The direc- 

 tor whispered to us that that young man was the son of a wealthy banker. 

 The truth is, the farm is considered an indispensable adjunct to the 

 school. Unless those who have the management of it show better crops 

 than others in the neighborhood, the Government withdraws its patronage. 

 And they do show better crops. I never saw better ones than those at 

 Glasnevin, near Dublin. There oats were raised eighty bushels to the 

 acre ; and other crops, wheat, flax, beans and potatoes in the same exu- 

 berance. This removes one of the great difficulties about these schools. 

 I do not wonder that people shrink from making additional experiments, 

 when they hear that this application of lime is going to work wonders, or 



