104 Technical Education in Agriculture. 
and attended to. An expert teacher going ttrougli the country 
disti'icts could give demonstrations on the pruning and the 
general culture of fruit trees, and answer questions upon points 
of practice. The crops usually cultivated in cottage gardens and 
allotments could be made the objects of similar instruction. 
Some bovs have an intuitive likinsr for and knowledgfe of farm 
stock ; they know all about horses in their rough way, and 
others know much about cattle or sheep. Give them a chance 
of systematising this knowledge, aid them by the knowledge of 
others, and there is no telling what good might result. Tillage 
school children might, very fairly, be taught something about 
the machinery on the farm, and they might learn to identify 
the insects which destroy, as well as the weeds which infest, the 
crops. As bearing upon this point the following extract is 
quoted from a paper on '"Preventable Losses in Agriculture" 
which the writer read before the Economic Science and Sta- 
tistics Section of the British Association for the Advancement 
of Science, at the Manchester meeting, in September, 1887 : — 
The yillage school affords an admirable means wherehy much useful 
instruction might be imparted to country lads, to their immediate intellectual 
benefit and to their subsequent welfare. For instance, attractive object 
lessons in botany and entomolotry might be made the means of familiarising 
boys with the habits and life histories of farm pests, and would foster iu 
them the practice of independent observation, so that iu years to come for 
each pair of eyes now at work there might be thousands. It surely would 
not be difficult to interest an intelligent village boy in the natural history of 
wireworms and leather-jackets, of turnip-flies and saw-flies, of birds and 
insects which help the farmer, and of those which injure him, of the good 
grasses and the bad, and of notorious weeds and parasites. Yet, whilst the 
school wall is adorned with pictures of the tiger and the elephant of the 
Indian jungle, there are none showing the metamorphosis of a click beetle 
or the structure of a grass. The boy may be taught to draw a map of the 
unstable frontiers of the south-east of Europe, which are hundreds of mil^ 
away, but he is never taught to seek out the ergot which infests the grasses, 
or to destrov the chrysalids which hang upon the hedgerows, or to recognise 
the plants of the meadow close to his cottage door. Knowledge such as this 
might become of much use to him, and render him a valuable and desirable 
servant in after years ; but it is kept from him, and he grows up stolid and 
indolent, because, during the most impressionable years of his life, our system 
of education fails to interest and instruct him in matters which will be of the 
greatest practical importance to him, and most intimately associated with 
his future labours. 
It is scarcely necessary to argue that it is the poorer classes 
who will most require the assistance of the County Councils, 
and of other local authorities in a position to aid them. A 
great work may be done in the rural districts, but it will need 
to be organised and directed from local centres. The agri- 
cultural labourer has always been more or less a problem, and a 
