Mat 16, 1913] 



SCIENCE 



753 



undertake to teach these things along with the 

 practise of farming to a lad just out of the 

 eighth grade? Manifestly not, and for the 

 reason that to him that hath shall be given. 

 Few of the well-prepared boys who enter col- 

 lie make good scientists. Almost none of 

 those entering Dr. Pritchett's ideal school 

 would be able to comprehend scientific prob- 

 lems at all. They would go back to the farms 

 because unprepared for any of the more ad- 

 vanced lines of agricultural work. 



Dr. Pritchett believes that the Iowa State 

 College has turned out more lawyers than 

 farmers. It is too bad to break down a sys- 

 tem of beliefs by ruthlessly intruding the 

 facts, but the information at hand shows that 

 about two fifths of the recent graduates of the 

 agricultural courses are engaged in actual 

 farming, while only 5 to 7 per cent, are in non- 

 agricultural work. But few of the graduates 

 have become lawyers. Until the demand for 

 teachers and experimentalists is met it is hard 

 to comprehend where they are to be trained if 

 not at agricultural colleges. It is also difficult 

 to see how these men could be more useful to 

 the state by working a farm than by teaching 

 the sciences pertaining to farming, editing 

 farm papers, or testing hypotheses concerning 

 the application of science to agriculture. This 

 answer must be either that all scientific re- 

 search is now complete, or else that scientific 

 research is not worth while, since, forsooth, 

 the agricultural college should make its main 

 work the teaching of the art of farming. 



The second thing needful in realizing Dr. 

 Pritchett's ideal in agricultural school effort is 

 isolation. This needs no discussion, since the 

 grade of education he has in mind certainly 

 could not flourish in a college, alongside of, 

 and on a par with, real college work. How- 

 ever, the world is big and there is a place for 

 the grade of instruction which the doctor has 

 in mind. In fact it is being offered in the 

 numerous short courses at the college and over 

 the state. There will be more such short 

 courses in the future, but the college will 

 hardly go out of business in order to make 

 room for them. It is not improbable that 

 county agricultural high schools, or even town- 



ship schools may, in a way which the college 

 could not, meet the needs which Dr. Pritchett 

 has in mind. Something of the sort has been 

 begun. In Europe this kind of instruction is 

 common, but the agricultural colleges are not 

 sacrificed in order that it may be done. On 

 the contrary, they furnish the teachers and a 

 large part of the subject matter for the courses 

 given in the lower grade schools. A paragraph 

 from Dean Bailey, of Cornell, often called a 

 prophet in agriculture, will not be amiss: 



An internal danger is the giving of instruction 

 in colleges of agriculture that is not founded on 

 good preparation of the student or is not organ- 

 ized on a sound educational basis. Winter-course 

 and special students may be admitted, and exten- 

 sion work must be done; but the first responsi- 

 bility of a college of agriculture is to give a good 

 educational course; it deals with education rather 

 than with agriculture, and its success in the end 

 will depend on the reputation it makes with school 

 men. B. H. HiBBAKD 



A CALL FOR AMPLE AND TRUSTWORTHY VITAL STA- 

 TISTICS 



The appeal of Dr. J. Madison Taylor, 

 published in Science, October 11, 1912, 

 for a more general and critical body of hu- 

 man statistics is one which should elicit a 

 ready response upon the part of scientific men 

 generally. No one who has had occasion to 

 investigate a problem involving data of hu- 

 man history but can confirm the deficiencies 

 to which Dr. Taylor refers. Something over 

 a year ago the present writer began an in- 

 quiry relating to educational betterment which 

 led to a search of various documents such as 

 yearbooks, census reports, reports of the 

 Bureau of Education, etc., and it soon be- 

 came apparent that these sources were note- 

 worthy for what they did not contain. In 

 other words, they were woefuUy lacking in 

 just that class of data which were vital to the 

 inquiry in hand. An inquiry as to the exist- 

 ence of personal and family records soon re- 

 vealed the fact that here, even more than in 

 the other sources, except in rare instances, it 

 was almost impossible to discover data of any 

 adequate or reliable character. 



The importance of such data in their rela- 



