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SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XII. No. 296. 



terested in aiming to shape good courses 

 in agriculture, each championing his own 

 department. 



Almost any one in short order can place 

 on paper groups of studies for each term of 

 four years and call it a course of study, but 

 to begin at the right end, experimenting 

 and working out all the details of each 

 topic, assigning reasons for each, before 

 generalizing, classifying and grouping into 

 courses requires much time, patience, skill 

 and mature judgment. Nor can we ever 

 expect to secure a uniformity in courses of 

 study for different colleges. These must 

 vary in different states to correspond to the 

 demands of the people, the views of the 

 faculty, and the special fitness of the mem- 

 bers of the faculty for teaching certain 

 topics. For twenty-five years I have been 

 at work adjusting courses in agriculture to 

 suit the views of myself and many new men 

 as they entered the faculty from time to time. 

 No two professors of agriculture or horti- 

 culture think alike. Besides great advances 

 are all the time being made. There have 

 come along one after the other or by twos 

 and threes during thirty years, a host of new 

 things, each clamoring for a place in the 

 course, such as plant histology, parasitic 

 fungi, the botanical study of grasses and 

 other forage plants, the critical study of 

 weeds from various stand points, forestry, 

 the use of insecticides and fungicides, soil 

 physics, stock feeding from the scientific side, 

 growing beets and making sugar from them, 

 making butter and cheese with scientific 

 explanations for every step of the process, 

 and smallest of all, though by no means 

 of least importance, the little microbes as 

 helps and hindrances to agriculture. 



Some of our members are especially 

 trained for the work of adjusting courses of 

 study from time to time, to keep up to date, 

 but to plan a course of study in agriculture 

 which shall remain satisfactory and up with 

 the times for more than a year or two at a 



time will be as disappointing as to attempt 

 to deliver a course of lectures that shall not 

 need remodelling in many particulars every 

 year or two. 



This is the way President Eliot put the 

 question in his annual report for 1888-1889 : 



" A problem has been pressing upon every 

 member of the board, old or young, expe- 

 rienced or unpracticed. During recent 

 years every college teacher has been forced 

 to answer anew the personal questions — • 

 What can I best teach, and how shall I 

 teach it? Every man has really been 

 obliged to take up new subjects and to treat 

 them by new methods. There is not a single 

 member of the faculty who is to-day teach- 

 ing what he taught fifteen years ago as he 

 then taught it. Each teacher has had to 

 recast his own work, each department re- 

 peatedly to modify and extend its series of 

 courses, and the faculty as a whole, to in- 

 vent, readjust, and expand the comprehen- 

 sive framework within which all these rapid 

 changes and steady growth have taken 

 place." 



Notwithstanding all this, we must keep 

 diligently studying to perfect even for the 

 time, a schedule of studies, approaching 

 nearer and nearer the ideal, though we 

 never attain perfection. 



University extension work has become a 

 familiar phrase. Some professors and as- 

 sistants in universities now devote all their 

 time to the subject, while others devote a 

 limited portion of time. The entire con- 

 tents of magazines dwell on extension work. 



In 1857, the first students entered the 

 oldest agricultural college now in existence 

 in this country. That was 43 years ago in 

 April last. Such colleges had no pattern to 

 follow, no men trained to the work ; most 

 of the farmers from the start were confi- 

 dent that such institutions would prove of 

 no value ; it was entirely against tradition. 

 The colleges dwindled with a very short roll 

 of students with no end of ridicule. What 



