1903 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER. 
5i5 
THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE SPIRIT. 
KASTKRN AND WESTBRN FOISTS OF VIEW. 
If you will permit me I would like to say that I 
think you are in error in your comparison between 
the eastern and western agricultural colleges. You 
think the colleges cannot create the agricultural 
spirit, as you term it, which we may suppose is not 
only the desire to increase our knowledge of this great 
work of the nation, but will be created by it. I think 
the facts are exactly the reverse. Just as the church 
creates a spirit of religious thought and feeling among 
the people, and the press does the same politically and 
socially, so the colleges, both special and general, not 
only foster the existing spirit of study and inquiry, 
but they do far more and to better purpose, by lead¬ 
ing this, and forming channels into which it may 
flow. Take a familiar example. A tract of arid land 
is irrigated by means of a stream brought on to it, 
and this stream is divided into a thousand rills, and 
so spread over the dry and previously barren land, 
thus causing verdure and a rich growth of harvest 
where—until this stream was brought into action— 
was a barren, thirsty, unproductive wilderness. Is it 
not the water courses which cause the verdure rather 
than the opposite? Let me give one signal example. 
Prof. Mumford, of the Illinois Station, takes the lead 
in the feeding of cattle for the market, and stirs up a 
vast general spirit of emulation in this leading indus 
try of his State, and those others of the so-called 
corn-and-cattle belt, which is doing great good in 
awakening (this is the true term to apply to the 
effects of his work), a general interest in not only 
his own State, but in the great corn growing and 
cattle feeding localities around him. His work 
goes out as a distinct creation, and infuses amaz¬ 
ing interest among the farmers and stockmen, 
which acts in such a way as to lead these to follow 
the examples thus set, of the profitable feeding 
of cattle; and thus not contribute to, but really 
create a new spirit and interest in the ordinary 
work of his constituents, as we may truly call 
the thousands of farmers, live stock farmers, and 
the general commercial interests, which are 
created and exist in closest communion with this 
leading agricultural pursuit. 
1 have had the great pleasure several times of 
personally noting this leadership of these great 
active educational institutions of the West, and of 
the confidence and dependence of the general 
agricultural interests upon the work of the col¬ 
leges and experiment stations, for information and 
I)ractical guidance. The professors of those col¬ 
leges give their, whole time and attention to these 
invaluable and most effective efforts and of their 
own thought and impulse, originate, and do not 
follow, a line of work laid out for them by their 
constituents merely, nor do they act on any course 
of inquiry and experiment laid out for them, 
through the action of some spirit of agriculture, 
as you term it, existing among the farmers; but 
they are essentially leaders in this work, which is 
really laid out by the active, industrious, thought¬ 
ful, and inventive minds of the professors, to 
whom the farmers look as their leaders and in¬ 
spiring spirits, and whose work is the building 
up of a more and more profitable agricultural sys¬ 
tem for the farmers to follow'. 
What, lot me ask, is the work of the agricultural 
press? Has it been built up by the farmers? Quite 
the contrary. I have been intimately connected with 
it for nearly 40 years. I have noticed its growth and 
the results of its work among the farmers, who have 
been trained and educated by it. And there is some 
essential similarity between the work of agricultural 
writers in these papers and the teachers of the col¬ 
leges. WTiat influence brought these agricultural col¬ 
leges into existence? That of the agricultural press 
unquestionably, for I remember well the beginning of 
every one of them in the East and the West; and I 
have perceived too how closely the growth of agricul¬ 
ture has followed the growth of the agricultural jour¬ 
nals, and BO, too, I can easily recognize the vast de¬ 
velopment of the old agriculture into its present con¬ 
dition first started by the agricultural press, and 
taken up and worked in unison most effectively by 
the agricultural colleges. Do the Christian people 
make the churches? Do the scholars make the 
schools? No! Quite the contrary. And it is dis¬ 
tinctly the same in regard to the agriculturai col- 
HENRY STEWART. 
R. N.-Y.—In the West farming is the most impor¬ 
tant industry. Farmers create public sentiment and 
are the leading class. In parts of the East farming 
occupies, as one writer puts it, “the position of hired 
girl.” Western farmers of the better class seem to 
have made their colleges what they are, and are 
naturally in close touch with them to an extent that 
may scarcely be expected in the East. 
THE NEW PROFESSOR OF HORTICULTURE 
AT CORNELL. 
When Prof. L. H. Bailey was appointed Dean of the 
New York Agricultural College there was consider¬ 
able curiosity to see who would follow him in the 
chair of horticulture. When Prof. John Craig was 
selected for this important position, there was gen¬ 
eral satisfaction. No more popular selection could 
have been made, for Prof. Craig is well known by 
New York fruit growers, and holds their confidence 
and esteem to a remarkable degree. Prom another 
point of view this was an admirable selection, for 
Prof. Craig has had a lifelong preparation for work 
of this sort. Of Scotch parentage, he was born at 
Lakefield, Province of Quebec, Canada, in 1864. He 
received his early education in the common schools, 
and matriculated for McGill University from the high 
school's of Montreal in 1882. The following three 
years were spent on the homestead fruit farm at 
Abbotsford, near Montreal, where he was associated 
with the late eminent Canadian horticulturist, 
Charles Gibb, as pupil and secretary. In 1885, he 
entered the Iowa Agricultural College as a special 
student in horticulture and botany, and completed his 
course with the class of 1887. On the establishment 
of the Federal Experiment Station the same year, he 
was elected assistant to the Director. About this time 
the Canadian government established its system of 
experiment stations, and Mr. Craig was called to Ot¬ 
tawa, Canada, in 1889, to fill the position of horti¬ 
culturist to the Dominion Experimental Farms. This 
position he held until 1897, when he resigned it to 
take up work in the graduate department of Cornell 
University. He completed the course and obtained 
the degree of Master of Science in Agriculture in 
1898 and was immediately called to the chair of hor¬ 
ticulture and forestry in the Iowa State College. In 
1900, when the College of Agriculture of Cornell Uni¬ 
versity sought a man to take charge of the principal 
educational features of her extension work—the 
correspondence courses in agriculture and the Winter 
coursei—Prof. Craig was elected to the chair of Ex¬ 
tension Teaching in Agriculture and Horticulture. 
In the prosecution of this work. Prof. Craig has been 
eminently successful, as evidenced by the rapid 
growth of the winter course in agriculture and the 
popularity of the correspondence courses in agricul¬ 
ture under his direction. In addition to the regular 
work of his department, he has, in the absence of 
Prof. Bailey during the past semester, taken charge 
of the courses in horticulture since the Easter recess. 
A good likeness of Prof. Craig is shown on this page. 
(He is the right man in the right place. His worth 
has been recognized by a number of scientific societies, 
and he already occupies an important place among 
teachers. 
THE VALUE OF CORN-AND-COB MEAL 
DOES IT PAY TO GRIND THE COBS WITH THE CORN ? 
Mr. Cook truly says (page 370): “In thoroughly 
dried corn the nutriment has been nearly exhausted 
into the kernel, and before feeding large quantities I 
should be assured that it could be very finely ground, 
which is difficult to do. If only cracked, or granu¬ 
lated it will probably not only have no feeding, or 
physiological effect, but be a positive damage to the 
animal.” I once had considerable experience in feed¬ 
ing corn-and-cob meal to horses, cattle and hogs, and 
my opinion of its feeding value is not so favorable as 
some others. All the animals I ever fed it to, unless 
very hungry, would try to separate the kernel meal 
from the cob meal. Hogs, especially, would root it 
over and try to pick out the kernel meal. For cattle 
I would much prefer cutting up cornstalks, or good 
bright straw, and after moistening it mix cornmeal 
and bran with it. Waldo F. Brown says: “I consider 
good bright wheat straw worth fully three-fourths as 
much as common hay.” Sir I^yon Playfair and John 
Gould believe that the value of cobs for feeding lies 
in the pota.sh they contain. Someone has Isuggested 
that the potash in the cob makes the meal more di¬ 
gestible. In my experience the cob, instead of being 
more digestible, is the very part of the ration that 
does not digest. The cob, with the exception of the 
pith in the center, and a few chaffy hulls, is chiefly 
composed of hard, flat, circular substances that are 
not only indigestible, but are sharp enough on 
their edges to irritate the bowels of animals and 
cause an undesirable looseness. It does not re¬ 
quire very strong spectacles to see those thin, 
hard, undigested plates in the excrement. Try 
whittling a dry cob, and you will find these sub¬ 
stances as hard as hemlock knots. 
There was a cob-meal craze more than 40 years 
ago. It broke out suddenly, like smallpox or scar¬ 
let fever, attracted a good deal of attention for a 
time, ran its course and died out. My father 
owned a grist mill, and at the suggestion of his 
miller, and the solicitation of his customers, built 
an addition to it, put in another water-wheel and 
procured the best machinery for grinding corn in 
the ear. For a time it seemed to be a profitable 
investment, and attracted customers from other 
mills to such an extent that the other mills had to 
put in machinery for grinding corn and cob to¬ 
gether. The additional toll for grinding corn in 
the era was not much, the mill was kept in good 
order and the meal ground as fine as possible, 
which, owing to the moisture in the cob, was not 
always very fine. Most farmers cominence feeding 
the new corn as soon as it is husked, which is the 
time the cob contains the most moisture and the 
most nutriment and cannot be ground fine. The 
cob's retain moisture much longer than the ker¬ 
nels, which makes them grind tough, and if the 
attempt is made to grind fine, the stones will begin 
to “grumble,” glaze over, the furrows fill up, and 
the mill goes slower and slower, and unless the 
stones are raised and allowed to grind coarser, 
will choke down, and stop with a full head of 
water on the wheel. Then the only remedy is to 
take the stones up and peck the glazing off. Our 
miller was honest, and did his best to do good 
work, but gradually the corn-and-cob custom fell 
off, and in three or four years had ceased entirely, 
although not a farmer in our region had bought 
a farm mill. The case was the same with every 
other grist mill in this part of the country, and 1 
do not know of a single mill that now has the 
machinery for grinding ear corn, nor a farmer who 
has a mill of his own for grinding it. What was the 
cause of such a surprising failure in the popularity 
of cob-meal mills? There is but one satisfactory 
answer. Our farmers, after having given corn-and- 
cob meal a thorough trial, became convinced that th*-- 
feeding value of cobs was so little that it did not pay 
to have them ground. j. w. ingham. 
Pennsylvania. 
The Markets at Erie, Pa. 
We have two market houses; they were built about 
eight years ago. Until then we used the streets. When 
we use the houses they charge 20 cents per day for eight- 
foot bench or stall. We have markets three times a week, 
Tuesday and Thursday until noon; Saturday till 10 o’clock 
in the evening. Farmers and gardeners are allowed to 
sell their own produce anywhere they please in the 
market house at 20 cents per eight feet, or peddle on the 
streets so long as it is their own growing, without pay¬ 
ing anything. Hucksters and peddlers who buy their 
produce, if they use the market houses, are charged 
for a stall $3.50 per month or 20 to 25 cents per day three 
days a week. A huckster’s city permit Is $4 per month; 
this allows him to peddle six days per week, but does not 
include the market houses. They are owned by private 
parties. Some years ago they tried to enforce a law 
that farmers and gardeners should pay a yearly license 
of $3; It did not work. The rules give very good satis¬ 
faction. C. w. z. 
