138 
Report on Agricultural Education. 
such capacities by the proprietor-farmers of the province, that 
the Institution is unable to satisfy their demands. 
At Bitburg the farm, which consists of 225 acres, and which, 
though it is not owned by the School, is placed at the service of 
the authorities by the director of the local Agricultural Society, 
who is its proprietor and occupier, is of great use for practical 
demonstrations and field experiments. Here the pupils are 
mostly sons of the small landowners in Rhenish Prussia. 
These men generally farm their own property ; their sons, after 
having passed through the school and served their time in the 
army, generally go out to obtain some practical knowledge of 
agriculture before they return to the paternal estate to undertake 
its management. As in the case of many of the other schools 
of this class in Germany, Mr. Miicker, the director, considers 
that the plan of studies is overburdened with subjects, and hopes 
that eventually it will not be necessary to teach more than one 
foreign language, and to make some other alterations by which 
greater proficiency in fewer subjects might be obtained. The 
opinion of high authorities, such as that of Privy Councillor 
Diinkelberg, director of the Agricultural Academy at Poppels- 
dorf, is that the combination of technical with general education 
is faulty, and that by this combination the instruction in agri- 
culture essentially suffers. And another authority, the Economy- 
Counsellor Petersen, states that he regards the combination of 
the qualification for the voluntariat with agricultural instruction 
as prejudicial to the future of the student. 
Mr. Jenkins thus sums up his own opinion of these schools. 
" My own impression of the education given at these schools 
was that they did not exceed in scope, and certainly »not in 
depth or breadth, the instruction given in our English county 
schools, at some of which the principles of agriculture are taught 
with no inconsiderable success. It must also be borne in mind 
that none of the German schools of this class are ' boarding- 
schools,' but that the pupils, except when their parents live in 
the town in which the school is situated, are deprived out of 
school hours of the supervision both of parents and school- 
masters. Rules are of course made to control the conduct of 
the pupils when out of school, but compliance with them must, 
to a large extent, depend upon the efficiency of a kind of police 
supervision, which to English ideas seems scarcely desirable as 
a means of regulating the conduct of youths between 15 and 
18 years of age." 
Lower Agricultural Education. 
We now come to the important subject of Acherhamchulen or 
Farming schools, as Mr. Jenkins calls them, and similar esta- 
