not enable them to pay their board, for before he left he suggested a plan to the board. This was the plan afterwards adopted, of having the long vacation in the winter, so as to afford students an opportunity to teach.

Subsequently, wages were still further lessened, as it was thought the labor was of more value to the students educationally, until the maximum wages now are eight cents an hour, for the regularly required work of students.

GOOD EDUCATION AT SMALL COST.

The winter vacation, the small wages received for work, the plan of boarding at cost,-a requirement of law,-does place an education in this institution within the means of many who could not or would not otherwise furnish it to their sons.

Many students pay in but about $70 a year to the college, and many of them still less; some of those who work Saturdays have only from $45 to $60 to pay in for a year of board and instruction and all college dues.

EXPERIMENTS.

To experiment for the sake of discovering knowledge, and to teach, that is, to impart existing knowledge, are distinct things. Both are necessary, in agriculture, as in other arts of life. They are not necessarily connected in an agricultural college, for the larger number of agricultural colleges have no farms for field and feeding experiments. Most of the European experiment stations of Europe have no college in connection with them. Doubt has been expressed whether instructions and experimenting can go well together. Thus Professor Hilgard, late of the University of Michigan, now of California University, says: "It is my opinion that in not a few instances the educational interests have suffered by being subordinated, or even too closely co-ordinated with to the experimental work." (Progressive Agriculture, page 25.)

In my opinion, experiments should be conducted every year at our Agricultural College, and a little farther on I will endeavor to show why. But at present, I ask which purpose is the main one, experimenting or instruction of students. To say that one purpose is the main one, is not, of course, to say that the other is not of very great importance; but if one purpose is comparatively the main one which is it?

If we can judge of the various enactments of Congress and the State the college is primarily one for instruction of students; the debates in Congress and in our own State, the addresses made at the opening of the college, the example of other institutions, all indicate the same. The good to be expected from it is primarily the theoretical and practical instruction of students. Medicine is a science whose underlying principles are but little better known than those of agriculture. There is abundant need, and abundant opportunity for original investigation in the healing art. But from its schools we look first for education of young men in medicine. In civil engineering much original investigation is still required. The strength of materials, the laws of fluids flowing through channels, and other subjects afford abundant room for experiments, but from the schools of civil engineering we expect primarily the making of civil engineers, capable of using what knowledge there is to be imparted in the science. Keeping up with the advance of knowledge in any department, giving instruction to classes by lecturing, superintending practice is considered usually a sufficiently laborious work for a corps of professors in any institution, and the world is glad if here and there one takes upon himself to add to the sum of human know. ledge.

Nothing was more natural, however, seeing the many problems that agriculture presented for solution, than to hope that the union of professors, laboratories and farms might result in a rapid advance of the art, and the speedy establishment of its principles. Such expectations, however, were opposed to the whole history of the advancement of science. Its growth is slow, and I hesitatenot to say that more is often hoped for from a single college in a few seasons than all the colleges of the earth could accomplish if they tried nothing else for the same time.

ROUGH EXPERIMENTS.

Experiments may be divided for my purpose into two kinds. The first I shall call "rough experiments." They are such as have determined that dent corn can adapt itself to our climate, that osage orange will make hedges in Illinois prairies, that sorghum is not profitable as a sugar-making plant with us. These and many other results have been gained by repeated trials made by enterprising farmers here and there, who have read of some one else's success and have risked the trial for themselves. The peculiarities of a soil, or a season that make success or failure, are eliminated by the repetition of the trials, until at last a settled conviction pervades community regarding some things, useful to be known. By such trials and the observation of skillful, practical men, the practice of farming has grown into its present shape.

More will have to be done in the same way. New crops, new varieties of old ones should be tried. And the more frequent the trials, the more exact the detail of the practice, the more intelligent the observer and operator, the more valuable will be the results of these rough experiments.

So many circumstances_enter into an experiment of this sort that the college can hardly try one for the farmers. It must rather be only one of several who try the experiment. For the climate of Central Michigan differs from that to the East, or West, or North. Soils vary, and an experiment tried here would have to be tried also in other localities before it would settle the value of any seeds or practice.

This, too, is not an age when diplomas and colleges impose on men. They listen as willingly to George Geddes, and "Walks and Talks," as to the professors of Yale or Harvard. So far as one experiment of this sort goes, an enterprising farmer can try it as well as we. The college should help in these, because it should join in whatever helps forward the progress of agriculture. But, perhaps, more rough experimenting could be accomplished by a small appropriation to, say, a half-dozen vigorous farmers' clubs. The libraries, apparatus and professorships of the college look to other purposes in addition to taking a proper share in these rough experiments.

EXACT EXPERIMENTS.

The other class of experiments I shall call "exact. They do not differ in kind from the rough experiments, but only in the care with which every element is observed and recorded. The aim of the scientific experimenter is to ask of nature, so to speak, one question at a time and only one; to put the question clearly, and take the answer exactly, adding no inference of his own. He may infer, he will do so no doubt, but the inference is his gratuity,each man may add his own. In all sciences this questioning is a matter of extreme diffi- · culty. "Rightly to question," says Lord Bacon, "is the half of science."

In agriculture, exact experiments are of extreme difficulty, and can almost never conform to ideal tests.

Lie

President Hitchcock, of Amherst, said he had been trying experiments in chemistry for twenty years, and added, "I do not know of any so delicate as the farmer is trying.' big says: "When the practical man does attempt to apply scientific teaching he is almost invariably a sufferer. He seems altogether to forget that man does not become intuitively acquainted with scientific teaching, which, like the skillful use of any complex instrument, must be learned."

These difficult experiments seem to be easy, and invite trial at incompetent hands. And so Appleton's Cyclopædia says truthfully: In agricultural reports and periodicals are thousands of reports on the value of manures, with most conflicting statements and a chaos of results." The Hon. Amasa Walker, the distinguished political economist, who, as Secretary of Massachusetts, collated the agricultural returns of the counties of the State in 1851, said "They are all chaos, they do not prove anything."

It is upon accurate experiments that agriculture must depend, for a change from an undeveloped art into the standing of a science.

Exact experiments demand a large outlay of money. Lawes & Gilbert have spent $15,000 a year in field experiments that have almost uniformly borne good crops. The universal testimony of those who undertake these investigations is to their costliness. Such experiments come slowly to their results. They would weary out those who wait for results. Bussey Institute, the Agricultural School of Harvard University, with its farm and seven professors, is prosecuting admirable field_experiments. Some seventy experiment stations in Germany, Chambers of Commerce in England, George Ville in the Jardin des Plants of Paris, Mechi, Lawes & Gilbert, Johnson of Yale, and all the experimenters of the world, would no doubt feel well repaid if the combined efforts of all together could elicit one new fact, and firmly establish it, each year. They will altogether fail of so rapid progress. "It takes ten years, at least," says President Clark, of Amherst, to establish one agricultural fact."-Mass. Agrl. 1872--3, p. 182.

Accurate experimenting taken alone does not serve as an illustration of farming. The results come too slowly to the student; he needs the example of ordinary good farming before him, where the results appear from year to year.

TO BEGIN WITH THE SOIL.

Dr. Thomas Anderson, the chemist of the Highland and Agricultural Society, who has been an authority in experimental agriculture for many years, lays it down as a rule in accurate experimenting, that the field to be used should be divided into plots, treated exactly alike over its whole extent, and the growth and produce of each plot separately examined for two years before the experiment upon it begins.-Agricultural Transactions of Scotland, 1861-5, page 116. Then for the effect of one manuring you must wait several years, and repetition then is requisite. I give, as an example, a case taken from the New York Weekly

Tribune for Feb. 10, 1875, where a man burned a quantity of brush on sod ground. A corn crop, an oat crop, and one clover crop showed no effects, but the third year the clover stood double on the portion where he had burned the brush. The writer pertinently asks, "Had I applied a different kind of fertilizer on my clover, would not the last applied have been likely to receive all the credit?"

I cannot go farther into the discussion of exact experiments. But I hold that those experiments that are to give us a science of agriculture must be left to skilled and scientific hands. Ville must be allowed to grow his plants singly in bottles. Liebig, Boussingault, Lawes, must each take the field he sees himself adapted for. I believe these are the most important kind of the two for the college to work at. The results may be more slowly reached, but they are of more permanent and general value. They require also a professional skill, chemical analysis, means of accuracy that the ordinary farmer cannot command. Is it not best to free institutions that can try these experiments from any over burden of the rougher kind that are within the means of many?

I should regard highly the criticisms of good farmers on our general farm management, our stock, our implements, and on rough experiments. But I believe I do them no wrong, if in the matter of the nice field and feeding experiments we have endeavored to try, I look rather to the verdict of Joseph Harris, who was once associated with Lawes and Gilbert, and is a good chemist and practical farmer; of Professor Johnson of Yale, and some halfa-dozen others who know the requirements of strict experimenting; if I believe with Liebig that professional skill is here required. I know that these men, that George Geddes, that Lawes and Gilbert of England, have taken a deep interest in our experiments, and have praised them highly, as exceptions to the general indefinite experiments that usually are made. I belleve that the State has just reason to be proud of the position the college has taken in this matter, as it has in its establishment of a successful school of agriculture. You will find that the good fame of the Agricultural College has gone hand in hand with the rest of the fame of this State for success in promoting a high and widely diffused education.*

COLLEGE MUST EXPERIMENT.

Although experiments are not the main object of the college, yet they are a very important object. There are abundant reasons why we cannot afford to do without them. That the progress of science is slow excuses no one from efforts to further it. Rough experiments it should do to some extent, because it should help along and illustrate all the movements that aid farming, and because at slight additional cost it can perform them. But it should particularly show examples of that rigid experimenting which is costly from minuteness of care, and valuable in proportion to its extreme exactness. It ought to possess the means and skill for teaching the determination of questions to the utmost attainable degree of precision, so that its graduates and students may go out qualified to help agriculture to become a science.

Not that these same graduates in their farm experiments would be as minute, generally, as the example given them. But they would be more exact, would understand the conditions present, and of those lacking more accurately, and interpret the results more cousistently with the conditions of the experiments. Field and feeding experiments enough to afford ample means of study, and excite enthusiasm, as many, indeed, as the limited means of the institution admit of, should be carried on. The rest of the farm and stock would af. ford illustration in study, and serve, as I shall by and by show, another indispensable purpose.

In such experiments the college has already shown its skill. Great pains was taken to make the experiments exact. There has been debate as to comparative value of small and large plats; most exact experimenters using small ones. We have combined the advantages of both large and small plats. Eight small plats fertilized with bone dust make quite a field taken together, and are in the aggregate no smaller because interspersed with eight of Berry's superphosphate, and eight of Baugh's superphosphates, and still more of plats unmanured. The intermingling of one considerable field with another, like the black and white squares of a chess-board, reduces the error of inequalities of soil which mere sight and handling cannot detect.

Although for reasons that seem sufficient to the honorable board of experienced farmers and others that have the college in charge, these experiments have been suspended for a few years, the college is ready to resume them, and must do so for educational, if no other purposes.

Again, a deadening influence would fall on faculty and students if we had no experiments. None are qualified for the high office of instructors in science who are not in spirit investigaters also. Truth-seekers are a brotherhood, and although scattered throughout the

I take pleasure in appending to this address, a letter from Joseph Harris, dated Feb. 26, 1875, regarding the exact experiments of the college, and a list of the published experiments."

world, here and there one, feel the subtle influence called esprit de corps, and help each other. Mr. Atwater, an acute observer of the experiment stations of Germany, seems to put the enthusiasm the stations awaken, as not the least of their good influences. Students catch the spirit of their masters and carry it through life.

Again, the world is in need of accurate observers, of those who in common operations of life distinguish between what they know and what they think they know. The simplest statement an uneducated man can make of what has passed under his observation is apt to be crowded full of his theories, his inferences. It is one of the last attainments of a disciplined mind to be able to distinguish the fact from the inference and to state it clearly. Lawyers know this. Men like Liebig know it.

Now, it is hoped that the Agricultural College will serve this very purpose, of sending back to their farms men who have this discipline, and who will use it for the good of the State; men who, from their scientific training, from their habits of observation, will distinguish better than they otherwise could do, just what it is that they endeavor to tell. They will take moisture into account when they weigh, will describe the feed from which manure is made when they tell the effects of manuring, and in a hundred ways, even though not professing to experiment, will be genuine experimenters. I look eventually for great good to come from their efforts.

I have spoken chiefly of farm experiments. But our Horticultural department has been experimenting, our Chemical department has been busy with original investigations, and our Entomological department at the service of the farmers of the State. The work these departments have done has not been small nor unimportant. If many of the papers in which the results of their working appear are to be found in the horticultural reports, the reports of the State Board of Health and in scientific journals, they serve nevertheless for the advancement of science and education in the State.

RESULTS.

Let us look at the results of this experiment in a new system of education. And, first, the college has a good number of students. Many and few are comparative terms. You have to take account of circumstances when you use them. Cornell University bas (1873--4) 461 students, and this college but 121. Their numbers are large and ours small. But Cornell University has nine distinct four-year courses, and we but one. In their agricultural course they have seven students, and we 121. Their numbers in this course are small and ours are large.

Let us consider this a little further. The young men are few who will take a fuller course of study than they think their business imperatively demands. And so doctors, lawyers, and clergymen slur over their preparatory, to enter at once on their professional education. The higher education is represented by Dr. Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institute as in "unstable equilibrium." It requires always the self-denying work of the few who appreciate it, to sustain it in community. All the students in all the regular classes in all the colleges of Michigan, the University included, did not in 1873 exceed 741. Our University, with its wide and well-earned fame, and free invitation to the world, catalogues in 1874--5, exclusive of law and medical students, 476 in its many courses.

Technological schools especially have but few students. Columbia College School of Mines, with a national reputation, and the services of 16 officers, besides the partial services of four others, has but 136 students (1872-3). Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard has 11 teachers and 35 students. The rich Stevens School of Technology had in its third year eight professors and 21 students. Yale Scientific School has 274 students, with a professor for each eight; the Massachusetts School of Technology has 375 students, and a professor for every 11 students. They have many courses of study.

Thorough technological instruction is costly, and not yet appreciated.

AGRICULTURAL STUDENTS FEW.

There are few students in agriculture the world over. "We have noticed the fact," says Louis Bollman, on Industrial Colleges, p. 21," of the small number of students at the European agricultural schools." Discerning persons saw how it would be. Wilson Flagg in 1857, says: "It is more important to increase the desire for any branch of knowledge than the opportunities for gaining it." Paul Chadbourne, President of Williams College, was for years a member of the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture, then President of the Massachusetts Agricultural College. Obliged from ill health to resign that place, he was made President of Wisconsin University, of which the Agricultural College is a part. Speaking from his wide experience, he says: "There is at present (1869) no such demand for thorough agricultural education as is generally supposed to exist." Very few young men are willing to spend the time and money needed to learn what is now known as practical agriculture,” and “a great deal is to be done in the community before our schools of agriculture can have the success which they even now deserve." Governor Chamberlain,

"

of Maine, in his message to the legislature, says: "A farmer's college is a good and worthy idea, but that alone will not live and move. There are not enough boys who mean to go back to the farm after they have got through college.

The colleges bear out the prediction; especially mere departments of universities have few agricultural students. Take Cornell University, and its students are catalogued are follows (Register 1873-4, page 164): In science, 119; literature, 30; arts, 25; agriculture, 7; architecture, 21; chemistry, 7; engineering, 84; mechanic arts, 32; natural history, 6; optional studies, 120; resident graduates, 10; total, 461. Seven agricultural students in 461. The University of Vermont and State Agricultural College trustees, in their report for 1873-4, page 12, use this language: "That young men do not come to us seeking such an education as a preparation for a life upon a farm does not surprise us. The idea that a farmer needs a thorough education, that he can make it serviceable to him as a farmer, that he is entitled to it, and to the social respect and public influence which it confers, it will take a long time to make familiar and operative in the farming community."

The President of the University of Minnesota, of which the State Agricultural College is a part (page 29 of report, 1873), reports 278 students, and says, "So far as I am aware, not & single man has come here desiring to learn the science of farming in order to practice it." The president now writes me that they have two students, and shall do much to develop the agricultural department soon. Bussey Institution, the Agricultural College of Harvard University, with an able corps of professors, has, I am told, but one regular student,-a graduate of the Michigan Agricultural College. Yale Agricultural College has almost no students in agriculture. The professors of these institutions are not idle, but in a certain sense have the world for their school,

President White, of Cornell University, writing of agricultural schools and departments, says of their students: "The number is at present very small, but I presume that no thoughtful man expected that so early a period after their establishment the number would be very large; nor indeed do I expect that for some years to come the number will greatly increase." In a new country like ours those professions which present the more brilliant returns will be sought for first.

The catalogue of the University of Wisconsin gives a separate place in its courses to agriculture; but although it catalogues students in classics, science, civil engineering, mining, and metallurgy, no one of its 411 students is put down as in the agricultural course. It is difficult to analyze the instruction in such colleges as Wisconsin, Illinois Industrial University, Kansas Agricultural College, Missouri University, and Iowa Agricultural College, and determine how much is agricultural. They may be doing good work, and doubtless will, in their scientific and agricultural departments. Their catalogues do not distinguish as a general thing. In Illinois a student may be pursuing two or more courses at once, and of its 406 students 39 would seem to have chosen agriculture as one, or by itself.

There are, however, hopeful signs for agriculture in the increasing prevalence of those studies which relate to agriculture and the mechanic arts. Several of the colleges sustain a professor of agriculture, and some of them several officers (Cornell has at least eight) whose instructions bear directly upon agriculture. In Cornell University, also, every candidate for any degree is required to hear a course of general lectures upon the subject,-a course sufficient, when given by men of such ability as that institution knows how to command, to "impress all with more correct ideas as to the value of the agricultural interest, and the pleasures that arise from it."

About one month ago (Jan. 13, 1875), the congressional committee on education and labor, after about a year's investigation into the affairs of the institutions established or assisted by the agricultural college land grant, reported to the house of representatives as follows: "The number of students in attendance upon these schools is already between 3,000 and 4,000; and they have furnished more than 1,600 graduates to the active occupations of life. * *There is evidence of an honest purpose to make the studies pursued such in variety, in extent, and in value, as shall meet the requirements of the laws to which they are indebted for their endowment."-(p. 10.)

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It appears then, that in every school, classical, technological, agricultural, the students are few compared with the great army of young men who are willing to do without a high education. One unacquainted with the principles of popular education would be tempted to inquire, when he sees the immense cost of colleges, universities, and technical schools, Whence all this waste? But I believe I address men who harbor no such misgivings. It has not been the wont of Michigan to put a low estimate on education, even in its highest and least frequented walks. I appeal for proofs to its generous support of its university, its normal school, and agricultural college. Instead of heeding that arithmetic which divides a total expenditure amongst a few students or graduates to show how expensive the education is, the State nurtured its university until, in spite of bitter opposition continued through many years, it is able to command respect. The agricultural college has had no fiercer opposition at any time than used to assail the university: its growth has not been