agricultural schools, where the planter and farmer may uot only re- 

 ceive a literary but a scientific and professional education. Medical 

 schools, law schools and theological schools have been in existence 

 for centuries, but a school for agriculture, the most useful and the 

 most wide-spread of all professions, would have been considered, 

 even tifty years ago, the most absurd of all institutions. 



The agricultural college of Louisiana, which is soon to be estab- 

 lished, should form one of the departments of the University, for it 

 offers all the advantages such a school requires without much addi- 

 tional labor and expense. It has the geological and mineralogical 

 eabinet. It will have one of the most extensive botanical museums 

 of the South. It has already professors of chemistry, geology, 

 mathematics, engineering, botany, modern languages, and it has also 

 a commercial department, which are the principal branches taught 

 in agricultural schools. It only needs in addition professors of ap- 

 plied chemistry, of practical agriculture and the mechanic arts. As 

 the funds derived from the sale of the land scrip can not be diverted 

 for the construction of college buildings, the University buildings, 

 wheresoever located, could be so constructed as to combine both 

 schools, and would thus save the State considerable expense. 



AGRICULTURAL RESOURCES OF LOUISIANA. 



The agricultural resources of Louisiana are very great. There is 

 no State in the Union, and no country on the globe of equal dimen- 

 sions, which can be compared with her in the salubrity and mildness 

 of her climate; the extent of her alluvial and arable lands; the 

 variety of her agricultural industry; the numerous navigable streams, 

 by which she is intersected, and her facilities for ocean navigation. A 

 State for which nature has done so much, and man has done so little; 

 a State where the orange and banana ripen their fruit in the open 

 air, and give to it an intertropical character; a State where cotton, 

 the most valuable product that feeds the commerce of the world 

 and regulates international finances, flourishes in its highest perfec- 

 tion; where sugar, the indispensable luxury of every household, can 

 be produced in quantities sufficient to supply forty per cent, of all 

 that is consumed in the United States; where rice is cultivated for 

 exportation, where corn grows most luxuriantly, where tobacco of 

 superior quality can be produced, and wheat and oats, and all other 

 cereals and almost every other product of the field, the garden and 



