42 
lines, and he owes much to the example and enterprise 
of the European planter, as well as to the assistance of 
the Government. 
With this material progress has come, somewhat 
slowly, the recognition of the fact that tropical agricul- 
ture is an applied science, and the reflection that pro- 
gress would have been more rapid and less costly had 
it been effected more generally under that enlightened 
direction which depends on the considered application 
of scientific principles. 
Agriculture in Europe is now thoroughly alive to 
these important considerations, and agricultural educa- 
tion is everywhere regarded as an essential preliminary 
to agricultural practice. Tropical agriculture has, 
however, only just reached this position, and its pro- 
gress so far has been in the main effected by men who 
have had to learn at their own cost, or at the cost of 
their employers, the intricacies of a subject in which 
only accumulated experience and native shrewdness 
were available as guides. The partial successes of 
the past afford, however, no reason for delaying an 
advance which has been made in all other pro- 
fessions, in which a system of technical education 
has replaced one of apprenticeship. The apprenticed 
apothecary of the past was successful in his own time, 
but he is now replaced by the scientifically educated and 
technically trained physician and surgeon, and no one 
would dream of reverting to a system of apprenticeship 
in place of the thoroughly equipped medical schools of 
to-day. The European farmer and employer of agricul- 
tural labour is now usually an educated man who has 
passed through the curriculum of one of the many 
efficient agricultural colleges which exist in this country 
and, indeed, throughout Europe. : 
The time has come to consider how education in 
tropical agriculture can best be provided. The open- 
ing up of new countries such as East, West, and 
Central Africa by European enterprise in agriculture 
has greatly increased the demand for men who are 
properly qualified to undertake such pioneer work. At 
present the means of learning the essentials of tropical 
agriculture usually consist in undergoing, with or 
without previous knowledge of temperate agriculture, a 
