36 AMERICAN FARMERS’ INSTITUTES. 


the institutes; and even where no official or legal connection 
exists the college teachers are expecied to interest them- 
selves in this external work. The institute work is therefore 
sometimes regarded as a system of university extension. 
It would appear that the institutes are at the present time 
undergoing a transformation owing to the desire of farmers 
to receive more specific instruction. There is a demand for 
courses of technical lectures on various subjects, and itinerant 
“dairy schools’ 
3 33 
and ‘‘schools of horticulture’ have been 
organised in various States. The administration of the 
institutes is of two kinds, viz., under governmental auspices, or 
in the hands of an educational institution. The Government 
control may be exercised in four different ways, viz., through 
a State Department of Agriculture, or by an independent 
State officer, or through county organisations or rural 
societies which receive State bounties. The work of the 
institutes proceeds directly from government departments 
in nineteen States comprising all those east of and 
including New York and Pennsylvania. There are also 
nineteen States in the South and West in which the insti- 
tutes are directly under the auspices of the agricultural 
college or experiment station. In anumber of States ssecitic 
appropriations are made for carrying on the work of the 
institutes, while in some States the funds provided for this 
purpose are more or less discretionary, and are derived from 
general appropriations to the State Department of Agricul- 
ture, from bounties dependent upon the number of partici- 
pants in the institutes, or from the funds of the college or 
experiment station. In nine States the annual appropri- 
ations from the State funds in aid of farmers’ institutes 
exceed £1,000 annually. 
From statistics collated by the Office of Experiment Stations 
it is estimated that about 2,000 institutes were held in the 
United States during 1899, and that they were attended by over 
halfa million farmers. The importance of institutes as factors 
in the general education of farmers in some of the States is 
shown by the number of meetings held and the average attend- 
ances. In Wisconsin there are now annually held 120 
institutes, with an attendance of over 50,000 persons - eam 
