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and we are only waiting now for the requisite funds. We 
shall look to this country, privately and officially, to come 
forward and help us. We cannot do it alone in Ceylon, 
although we are prepared to do our share there privately and 
officially, and' we do want those great commercial bodies and 
companies which are built up on the products of the East to 
do their share here. But I want to-day just to point out to 
you a few difficulties which have occurred to me in thinking 
of this question, because I should be very sorry to see a 
college established either im Ceylon or anywhere else, and 
failing to carry out whatever it was proposed to carry out. 
Now in a college of agriculture in the United Kingdom or 
in any of the Dominions a student can go in, and he can come 
out a competent agriculturist. He can take up dairying, 
stock-farming, wheat growing, oats, barley, roots—it does 
not matter what it is, he comes out fully equipped. He can 
go to the Dominions, to Australia, or New Zealand, or 
Canada, or elsewhere, and he is immediately at home on the 
land. Now as far as botany and entomology and chemistry 
go, the education which the student receives in England will 
be the same in its general principles—especially as regards 
chemistry—as he will require in the tropics, but when we 
get on to crops and practical agriculture we enter a com- 
pletely new field. What strikes me in thinking about this 
idea of tropical colleges is that we are treading on completely 
unknown ground; we do not know yet how we are going to 
grapple with this tremendous subject of tropical agriculture. 
As I say, a student in England can become a fully equipped 
farmer, but there is no man living who can say that he ts a 
fully equipped tropical agriculturist, because he must be a 
specialist—it may be in sugar, in tobacco, in tea, in rubber, 
or in something else, and we cannot staff our college with 
specialists—it would be impossible. My time is up, gentle- 
men, but I am very glad to have had sufficient time to bring 
that point before you. I should just like to add this one word 
further—that not only do we require specialists for the various 
crops, but in the case of certain crops like sugar (and we are 
coming to the same thing in regard to rubber) we require 
specialists for the field and specialists for the factory also. 
I have brought this difficulty before you in order that those 
whose minds are now engaged on this important question may 
not lose sight of this great difficulty which I foresee. 
Professor AiInsworTH-Davis (Principal, Royal Agricultural 
College, Cirencester): Mr. President and Gentlemen—I 
should like all those present who have not an intimate know- 
ledge of the attention whith is being given in the agricultural 
colleges of this country to the matters with which we are here 
