1 Aprin, 1899.] QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL. 255 
It is of a recent phase of agricultural educational effort that I desire to 
speak particularly at this time. A number of institutions, goaded by the charge 
that they had no pupils, endeavoured to meet the farmers by giving practical 
short courses of instruction. With some, such courses were a mere “ tub to 
the whale ”—something given to allay grumbling and discontent. “With others 
it was an earnest effort to get down to farmer conditions and teach young 
farmers something about farming. At the University of Wisconsin, for 
example, we could not get the young men to take the long course in agriculture, 
while we found that they would come to study in what is called the short 
course. Instruction was offered for 12 weeks during the winter, when the 
young farmers could best be spared from the farm. ‘Thirteen years ago this 
effort was begun with nineteen pupils. This year sees over 300 pupils study- 
ing agriculture at the University of Wisconsin. Our course of 12 weeks has 
grown to two winters of 14 weeks each. Creamery and cheese factory opera- 
tions are taught as a separate branch covering 12 weeks. As the farmers learn 
of the school and what it can‘do for their scns, our attendance increases. As” 
we strive to teach real agriculture and as we improve our equipment and 
facilities generally, our numbers increase. In this course we teach nothing but 
agriculture and pay no attention to the previous general training of the students, 
rolding that they should remain in a country district school until they have 
completed that course. These young men are daily drilled in the feeding, 
breeding, and management of live stock, the cultivation and management of 
crops, construction and ventilation of farm buildings, the care and management 
of gardens and orchards, farm blacksmithing, farm carpentry, &c. More than 
a score of teachers give their whole energies to these lines of instruction. 
A more eager, earnest set of young farmers can nowhere be found. They 
have come directly from the farm, and they will return to it in March next. 
It is interesting to note that, in the case of our Wisconsin school, probably 
40 per cent. of the young men studying with us in the farm courses will hire 
out on farms next spring as farm hands. ‘The call for these young men is 
beyond our ability to supply. Farmers write us that they want one or more 
young men who have attended our school the coming season to work on their 
farms, saying that they prefer our students because they are industrious, 
temperate, and they can have them sit at their own tables without being 
ashamed of them, or having them influence the younger members of the family 
unfavourably through bad habits, bad manners, &c. Last spring, at the end 
of the short-course term, we hired out fifty-one of these farmer students 
within two weeks’ time, and had many more calls than there were young men 
seeking places. These young men found places from Massachusetts to 
California. 
The University of Minnesota, in the desire to get nearer the farmers, has 
hit upon a happy line of effort. Here the students spend three winters of six 
months each in pursuing academic studies, combined with agriculture and the 
domestic sciences. ‘Thus their common school education is increased, and they 
are kept near the farm and the home in thought and training. A_ total 
attendance of about 400 plainly attests the wonderful popularity of this 
institution among the farmers of the State, and shows how wisely the university 
authorities have planned. I believe that the experiences of Minnesota and 
Wisconsin, added to the work of such institutions as Michigan and Iowa, show 
plainly that in all the older agricultural States at least by properly studying the 
needs of the farming class a large attendance can be secured at the agricultural 
college. Each State must work out the problem to suit its particular condi- 
tion, for no doubt they vary more than one would suspect from a cursory 
examination. 
In the 18 years’ work given to building up the College of Agriculture at 
the University of Wisconsin, I have become more and more impressed with the 
necessity for making agricultural instruction intensely practical. I hold that 
when the teacher properly understands his work this practical instruction can 
be scientific and normal in every particular, and that it is only through 
