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today. Since the University established its experiment 

 station in 1875, the oldest, by the way, in the United States, 

 three men have been elected directors thereof and they 

 all stand before you this morning. Our picture has no 

 perspective: it is all foreground: it is flat as the mural 

 paintings of Nineveh. But it is full of action: there is 

 sequence in it and there is a scale of values and we make 

 our great men large by defying perspective, as the Egyp- 

 tians did. 



Thus we can symbolize progress. We can also recognize 

 progress in the mass, for there are things here which before 

 were not and these things have been increasingly here for 

 we see the resources of the department, in officers and 

 students and its products, in courses of instruction and in 

 publications, increased from five hundred to a thousand per 

 cent during the last decade. Still there is no perspective, 

 for it is all so new and the men who have accomplished 

 this are still at work. But we are now laying the founda- 

 tions for a perspective. What we are doing today will be 

 counted a century hence as the beginnings of things. 



Probably the best thing we can undertake for the future 

 is to fix a vanishing point in our horizon line, but what 

 can we do who have had to work with physical things which 

 would not remain long enough to vanish in a decently 

 orderly manner with things which stayed not upon the 

 order of their going but went at once? Look at the agri- 

 cultural emblems on the sides of South Hall: they were 

 emblazoned to the honor of this department, but, from its 

 burrow in the basement, agriculture looked outward and up- 

 ward at them as a man might be imagined to be looking 

 from his grave in wrapt admiration of the tracery on his 

 tombstone. South Hall was never an "agricultural build- 

 ing" except in a decorative sense. Twenty-five years ago 

 we forsook the cellar of South Hall and captured an 

 abandoned carpenter shop and it became the first "agri- 

 cultural building" of the University. It was last seen 

 spanning the creek just below the slope on which we are now 



