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It shows its great power and usefulness. The agricultural college takes a boy 
from this place and another from that place, educates him, teaches him what his 
gifted fellow-men have been doing in the way of inventing new methods of creating 
wealth, increasing the production of farms, aiding human labor by machinery ; it 
sends him back to his community charged with information and with a spirit of 
inquiry. The college may profitably set its students to reporting upon the condition 
of their local communities; discussing the methods in vogue, and especially making 
note of the enterprising citizens of their localities. This suggests what we call 
" university extension," now creating so much interest in this country and England. 
University extension seems to be the very field of greatest usefulness open to the 
agricultural college. I defer to your better wisdom in this matter. It seems to me 
that such extension of higher education and of secondary education promises to 
enable us to take account of two kinds of youth in the community. One kind of 
youth we have provided for. He is the boy who wants the old-fashioned education 
and his parents can afford to pay for it. 
We make him pass strict examinations in the elementary work, and promote him 
step after step when he has completed the course prescribed. Hitherto we have 
excluded the other kind of boy, the boy who has great talent in some particular direc- 
tion, but has not a taste for the old-fashioned education and will not pass through 
a course of study extended through many years. The secondary school and the col- 
lege lose their hold of this class of youth. But a great many of our successful men 
come from this class. Perhaps they would have taken a regular course of education 
in the schools if their parents had furnished the money for it. A great many of our 
millionaires are not college bred; many of our inventors are not college bred; they 
have nevertheless become giants in their special provinces. They have been gifted 
in special powers. It would be interesting could we trace in every case the history 
of these men back through their infancy, and study their heredity also. We should 
see how the brain, nerves, and energy of the family worked to develop a man who 
has a faculty of secreting wealth as the adipose tissue is secreted in the body. It is 
a matter of congratulation that the agricultural college is about to take hold of this 
work and look after the sporadic individual who is good in some particular line, but 
has no activity for general studies, or at least no taste for them. His whole soul 
goes out in activity on some particular line. It may be entomology, or astronomy, 
or meteorology, or botany, or archaeology, or it may be a much narrower province, 
such as the cultivation of the potato, the improvement of the beet root for the 
table or for sugar-making purposes. We shall agree that the schools ought to get 
hold of such men. I believe it is one of the important functions of the agi cultural 
college to look out for the youth who do not come to school, but who show eminent 
capacity in particular lines relating to the industries, or especially agriculture. My 
neighbor, Mr. Bull, in Concord, Mass., invented the Concord grape by a long series 
of experiments on the native grapes of his region. 
I do not mention this function of the agricultural college as seeming to offer advice 
to you who are present, for I well know that you are the most competent men in the 
United States to understand the work of the agricultural colleges, and I believe that 
you have found out or are in the process of finding out the lines in which to best 
direct their work. This annual conference of agricultural college presidents is 
itself sufficient evidence that what each discovers in the course of the year is 
brought to the attention of all his fellows. There is a constant process of reenforcing 
each agricultural college by the experience of all similar institutions. 
While I, as an outsider, am not competent to suggest new lines of work, I claim 
to know enough about the subject to arouse in me the desire to get brief reports on 
the progress made by the faculties of your institutions in reducing agriculture and 
kindred branches of industry to a pedagogical form. The branches of instruction 
in the old colleges have long since been reduced to such a form. The studies of 
Latin and Greek, mathematics, history, geography, grammar, have been so arranged 
that the lesson that lies nearest to the pupil's mind is placed at the beginning. It is 
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