26o ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 



as it has come to them with varying degrees of success, but generally 

 for the better. During the past two hundred and fifty years this nation 

 has solved some 'of the greatest problems of the race. The nation has 

 greater problems to solve than it has yet encountered, but it was 

 never before so well able to solve them. We need have no hesitation 

 about our posterity. In all probabilities they will attend to their affairs 

 better than we have attended to ours. All that is here asserted is that 

 during the coming generations, men will be needed who have delved 

 deeply into the sciences relating to life. The problem will not be so 

 much the methods of harvesting, manufacturing, and marketing the one 

 blade that now grows, but rather what the life processes by which two 

 blades may. be. made to^ grow. To the men who have prepared them- 

 selves to solve these problems of life will come the opportunities of the 

 future. 



It is curious to note how unconscious the nation is concerning the 

 matter. In the very years when its soil was yielding her harvests most 

 abundantly, congress passed laws which have started the most stupen- 

 dous enterprise for scientific research relating to the life and welfare 

 of the nation that the world has ever seen. The federal government 

 this year appropriated for the work of its Department of Agriculture, in- 

 culding the state experiment stations, over four and one-half million 

 dollars, to say nothing of the provision that is made for teaching or that 

 is made by the several states to the same objects. Even before there has 

 come an apparently pressing demand for it, the nation is deep into the 

 work. 



This, then, is the message, which I bring to the young men of today — 

 the nation's workers of tomorrow. The Colleges of Agriculture are 

 teaching the sciences relating to life in a practical manner, so that he 

 may become useful both to himself and to mankind. It is an education 

 for agriculture, in agriculture, and by agriculture. It is a sound educa- 

 tion worthy of the deepest intellect. The present and the future de- 

 mand men prepared to solved the greatest of problems — the problems 

 which concern living things. Who knows why clay soils are sticky, and 



