8 
CORNELL UNIVERSITY 
the basis of broad interests and diverse experiences. I think it a 
great gain for a young person to have had this contact with human 
experiences before he leaves college rather than to be obliged to wait 
for them until after commencement day. 
In the third place, I have watched the work of the Department 
because of the character of its instruction. It has not been education 
in the mass or in concert. The student has been put to work at a 
personal problem, one student with one problem, with one microscope, 
with one specimen. He has been taught to see the object for himself 
and not to take the word of his neighbor. He has been challenged 
and stimulated to understand the object. He has been taught that 
his work is not complete until it is accurate. He follows his subject 
in order that he may attain the truth, and attain it for himself. 
Good education is always personal; it is the result of application, each 
student alone and on his own responsibility. The tendency is too 
apparent in this time to dispense learning to groups and to classes 
rather than to bring it about as the result of painstaking, consistent, 
and careful effort on the part of a student who has a separate seat, a 
separate instrument and a separate inquiry. 
And again, I have been much impressed with the fact that this 
Department of Entomology has considered its great laboratory to be 
out of doors. It is not a laboratory department alone, in the sense 
in which we are likely to use the words. Here at Cornell the out-door 
feeling has always been strong; this is not only because the university 
is itself in the open, but also because there have been men like Com¬ 
stock who have wanted to test their work against the fields and the 
forests and in the streams where the organisms live and die. It is 
fortunate for any university to stand hard by the open country where 
there are gorges and swales and uplands, where there are shores, deep 
forests and the tilled fields, where there is room for natural history. 
These detract nothing from the pursuit of the older humanities and 
they also add very much to the effectiveness of any study with the 
newer humanity, which is the putting of the student in touch with 
the great environment into which the race is bom. This spirit was 
in Roberts, under whose portrait we sit; it has been in the great 
teachers in the College of Agriculture and elsewhere in the university; 
it has been a very marked attribute of this Department of Entomology. 
And finally, I have been interested in the Comstock Department 
because of the contribution it has made to the State. Every institu¬ 
tion of learning carries a great obligation to the people. An institu- 
