71 
our unfamiliarity with the language in which it was read, I 
am sure you will wish to express your great admiration of 
the activity of Dr. Gioli and his colleagues. His countrymen 
have not been very long engaged in colonial work, and they 
certainly have the advantage of our experience as well as our 
mistakes to guide them. They also have the advantage of a 
climate at home which enables them to do a great deal more 
in the way of preliminary work than we could possibly attempt 
in this country. All of you will join me, I know, in wishing 
great prosperity to the efforts which Italy is now making to 
establish agriculture successfully in her new African posses- 
sions. Lastly, we have heard Mr. Hamel Smith’s exceedingly 
interesting and, I think, weighty plea for the establishment of 
an agricultural college in the Western Hemisphere, for which 
he adduces evidence not merely based upon the importance of 
such a college to the West Indian Islands, but goes further, 
and points to the importance of establishing it as a means 
of training the numerous young men who go out to Latin- 
America to engage in agricultural pursuits. 
Mr. R. N. Lyne (Director, Department of Agriculture, 
Ceylon): Mr. President and Gentlemen—I have listened with 
very great interest to the papers which have been read here 
to-day, and more especially to what our President said in his 
opening address this morning, when he appeared to me to 
place the general outlines of the question of education in 
tropical agriculture in its true perspective. We are doing 
something in Ceylon in the matter of education in tropical 
agriculture, and we are approaching it from three points of 
view. In the first place we have to consider the training of 
the peasantry. This can only be done by educating the 
children in the schools. It is no use, in my opinion, ever 
attempting to alter the methods of the adult goiya, as we call 
him in Ceylon. The education of the children in the schools 
can only be effected by educating, in the first place, the school 
teachers, and for this purpose we have sent to one of the 
Agricultural Colleges of India—Poona—four selected students 
to take a three years’ course. They are returning next year 
to Ceylon, and in the meantime we are getting ready with our 
buildings and our organization to begin upon the education 
of the teachers. Our object is that agriculture shall become 
a subject in the curriculum of the vernacular schools, just as 
arithmetic or history is now. The next question is the educa- 
tion of what we call the conductor or overseer class. As a 
tule in Ceylon, and also in many other tropical countries, this 
class of man can speak English, and it is our intention to try 
and graft on to our organization for the education of the 
school teachers the education of the conductor. Of course, 
4 
