required to take full courses in from two to four departments. The outlook for both the agricultural and mechanical departments is encouraging.

South Dakota Agricultural College, Brookings, S. Dak.-The young men's dormitory has been transformed into a laboratory for the botanical department, class rooms for mechanical drawing and for the work in industrial art, and for the library. The old quarters of the library have been converted into a physical laboratory. A system of waterworks was also provided, by which all parts of the institution have been furnished with an abundance of good water.

University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tenn.—The university made marked progress during the year. The noteworthy departure of the year was the admission of women to the academic department of the university with all privileges of scholarships, etc. Women have to be 17 years of age and meet the same requirements with regard to admission as men. Fifty-six women were admitted to the freshman, sophomore, and junior classes of the various courses and made an excellent record for both work and conduct. A separate building was fitted up with reading rooms, study rooms, society hall, lunch room, and toilet room for their exclusive accomodation while at the college. They boarded in private families in town selected by the faculty.

The attendance upon the college of agriculture and mechanic arts was the largest in the history of the institution, reaching a total of 334 for the year.

Among the material improvements which have been ordered and are now under way are an office and dormitory building on the college farm for the accommodation of agricultural students, and a drill and athletic ground. The new dormitory will contain ample accommodations for the special agricultural students who have hitherto had to live with the other students in the regular college dormitories, together with dining rooms, kitchens, and other facilities for their cooperative boarding club. Its location on the college farm will enable them to give much closer attention to the practical work of the department.

Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, College Station, Tex.-The attendance during the past session was at all times as great as our accommodations warrant. A characteristic feature added was the provision made by the legislature for additional student labor; the larger part was educational, for which no compensation was allowed. Students performed noneducational labor when required by the college and received compensation according to industry, faithfulness, and efficiency.

Prairie View State Normal School, Prairie View, Tex.-All departments showed marked progress. Students take readily to industrial pursuits.

Agricultural College of Utah, Logan, Utah.-The new laundry, kitchen rooms, and culinary rooms of the domestic arts department, rooms for dairy department, shops for iron mechanism, forge shops, wood shops, drawing rooms, and laboratories of the new building have been found excellently adapted to their purpose. The college graduated its first class of 15 members this year. The commercial course has been extended to four years.

University of Vermont and State Agricultural College, Burlington, Vt.-Two new buildings are being erected, and will cost, with equipments, $250,000. The number of students in the industrial departments is increasing, both actually and relatively. A valuable tract of land, 18 acres, has been purchased.

Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College, Blacksburg, Va.-The faculty has been increased by the addition of three assistants-1 in mechanical engineering, 1 in English, and 1 in mathematics. New buildings erected were a creamery and cheese factory, cottage for horticultural foreman, and a dormitory containing 55 rooms. Large and important additions were made to the equipment of the departments of electrical and mechanical engineering; new lathes, benches, and machines were put in the wood shop; foundry put in running order; steam laundry put in operation, and large additions made to the apparatus in the different scientific departments. Two new pieces of artillery were purchased; 20 cows were added to the dairy herd, and pigs of

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improved breed were obtained. The degrees conferred were as follows: 9 B. S.; 1 A. M.; 1 M. E.; 1 C. E.

Washington Agricultural College and School of Science, Pullman, Wash.-A short course in agriculture is offered for the benefit of those who come from the farm and go back soon to the farm. The course in domestic economy was well attended by young women. The course in agriculture was attended by 25 young men.

West Virginia University, Morgantown, W. Va.--The number of students has been greater than in any other year in the history of the university. The full agricultural course has been extended to four years. Special effort is being made to develop the department of mechanical and electrical engineering and mechanic arts. Extensive additions have been made to the equipment and the capacity of the buildings will be doubled. About $10,000 were expended on buildings for the experiment station. University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis.-During the year the horticultural building has been erected at a cost of $23,167, $14,200 of which sum was by direct appropriation from the legislature of 1893 for that purpose. The same legislature appropriated $800 for tobacco investigations. One hundred and three students took the dairy course; we could have had twice this number had there been accommodations. The legislature of 1893 appropriated $25,000 for an addition to the present mechanical building, and these improvements are now well under way.

University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyo.-The equipment of the various laboratories has been improved, and the facilities for instruction are much better than heretofore. Wyoming is not an agricultural State and our students are not disposed to pursue a strictly agricultural course; but the mechanical engineering course is quito popular with the students, many, in scientific courses of the university, availing themselves of the opportunity offered in manual training afforded by the workshop of the mechanical department.

THE TEACHING OF AGRICULTURE.

[The following address was delivered by the Commissioner of Education at the annual meeting of the Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations, held at Washington, D. C., in 1894.]

I thank you, Mr. President, for your kind allusions to me personally. In the few remarks which I have to make I propose to call attention to the twofold relation which the agricultural college bears, namely, on the one hand, to the Department of Agriculture, and on the other hand, to the Bureau of Education. The Department of Agriculture assists it by making wise and useful experiments in regard to plants and animals, the selection of the best methods of training and cultivating, the modes of adaptation to climate and soil. We, in other Departments of the Government here in Washington, are proud of what the Agricultural Department does in these and in other lines; but my Bureau wishes to be kept in mind by the managers of agricultural colleges for its interest in methods of teaching and school management. I shall speak at length of the method of teaching agriculture as a branch of study. The agricultural population in any country is the most conservative class of all its people. They follow the methods of their predecessor; they are patriarchal in their ways. You have dealt with them and do not need assurances from me. You could read us a lesson on this subject; but I was born on a farm and had the education of a farmer and know something about the prejudices and conceits that he harbors. The farmer believes his vocation to be the one which secures the most personal independence of all employments, because he raises what he eats and often the raw material for clothing. He thinks of an ideal civilization in some far distant future which shall have no cities, but only farms. I could make a long story of the development of my own ideas in this regard. I could tell how I changed my former ideas and came to see that farming is the most dependent of the employments, and that instead of farm life, urban life is the life of the future and of the highest civilization. Farming will in that period become market gardening and be as

profitable as manufacturing and commerce are. I began by supposing that the farmer produced most of the wealth of the country, but when I investigated the questions of political economy I learned that it is the manufacturer and commercial vocations which add most to the value of our productions.

The raw material furnished by the farmer constitutes one-fourth or one-fifth of the wealth of the country, and the three-fourths or four-fifths which includes the other wealth of the country is furnished by the manufacturer and trader and the one who transports the goods. Looking into the problem of the education of the farmer one meets first these curious facts: He finds the farmer the most conservative person and the person who is the most ignorant of the true basis of modern civilization, which rests on productive industry and the application of machinery to the performance of the drudgery of the world. All this points directly to the significance of the agricultural and mechanical college. It shows its great power and usefulness. The agricultural college takes a boy from this place and another from that place, educates him, teaches him what his gifted fellow-men have been doing in the way of inventing new methods of creating wealth, increasing the production of farms, aiding human labor by machinery. It sends him back to his community charged with information and with a spirit of inquiry. The college may profitably set its students to reporting upon the condition of their local communities, discussing the methods in vogue, and especially making note of the enterprising citizens of their localities. This suggests what we call "university extension," now creating so much interest in this country and England. University extension seems to be the very field of greatest usefulness open to the agricultural college. I defer to your better wisdom in this matter. It seems to me that such extension of higher education and of secondary education promises to enable us to take account of two kinds of youth in the community. One kind of youth we have provided for. He is the boy who wants the old-fashioned education and his parents can afford to pay for it.

We make him pass strict examinations in the elementary work, and promote him step after step when he has completed the course prescribed. Hitherto we have included the other kind of boy-the boy who has great talent in some particular direction, but has not a taste for the old-fashioned education, and will not pass through a course of study extended through many years. The secondary school and the college lose their hold of this class of youth; but a great many of our successful men come from this class. Perhaps they would have taken a regular course of education in the schools if their parents had furnished the money for it. A great many of our millionaires are not college bred; many of our inventors are not college bred; they have, nevertheless, become giants in their special provinces. They have been gifted in special powers. It would be interesting could we trace in every case the history of these men back through their infancy and study their heredity also. We should see how the brain, nerves, and energy of the family worked to develop a man who has a faculty of secreting wealth, as the adipose tissue is secreted in the body. It is a matter of congratulation that the agricultural college is about to take hold of this work and look after the sporadic individual who is good in some particular line but has no activity for general studies, or at least no taste for them. His whole soul goes out in activity on some particular line. It may be entomology, or astronomy, or meteorology, or botany, or archæology; or it may be a much narrower province, such as the cultivation of the potato, the improvement of the beet root for the table, or for sugar-making purposes. We shall agree that the schools ought to get hold of such men. I believe it is one of the important functions of the agricultural college to look out for the youth who do not come to school, but who show eminent capacity in particular lines relating to the industries, or especially agriculture. My neighbor, Mr. Bull, in Concord, Mass., invented the Concord grape by a long series of experiments on the native grapes of his region.

I do not mention this function of the agricultural college as seeming to offer advice to you who are present, for I well know that you are the most competent men in the

United States to understand the work of the agricultural colleges, and I believe that you have found out or are in the process of finding out the lines in which to best direct their work. This annual conference of agricultural college presidents is itself sufficient evidence that what each discovers in the course of the year is brought to the attention of all his fellows. There is a constant process of reinforcing each agricultural college by the experience of all similar institutions.

While I as an outsider am not competent to suggest new lines of work, I claim to know enough about the subject to arouse in me the desire to get brief reports on the progress made by the faculties of your institutions in reducing agriculture and kindred branches of industry to a pedagogical form. The branches of instruction in the old colleges have long since been reduced to such a form. The studies of Latin and Greek, mathematics, history, geography, grammar have been so arranged that the lesson that lies nearest to the pupil's mind is placed at the beginning. It is followed by a second lesson which presupposes the first lesson and builds upon it, a third lesson, a fourth lesson, and all the rest follow; each one building on what has gone before it and adding some new matter of consideration that is important and useful. It is essential to the pedagogical form that the first lesson shall be useful and good if no other lesson follows it. It is essential that if you cut off the series of lessons at any point that all shall be useful and valuable up to that point. It is bad pedagogical form to oblige the pupil to learn a series of lessons which are nothing in themselves but the mere scaffolding to an important idea by and by to be developed.

In your branches of mechanical industry you find that much has been done to reduce these to a pedagogical form. In the public schools of many cities, especially in Massachusetts, cooking is taught in a series of progressive lessons. Its pedagogic form has been fully developed. I take it that in the study of agriculture whatever branches are taught as preliminary discipline should have practical illustrations drawn from the soils, plants, and animals at every step. As in all other branches, we must get hold of the interest of a pupil, both hereditary and acquired, and fasten one by one our studies to this interest. I desire to get from each agricultural college brief reports of progress made in reducing the various features of this field of study to a pedagogical form, being confident that when this reduction is complete, instruction in agriculture will not only be well managed in your institutions, but also will find its way into the elementary schools of the farming districts.

I read some time ago in Thorold Rodgers, in his book entitled "Six Hundred Years of Wages," Chapter XVI, the following:

"We owe the improvements in English agriculture to Holland. From this country we borrowed, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the cultivation of winter roots, and at that of the eighteenth century the artificial grasses. The Dutch had practiced agriculture with the patient and minute industry of market gardeners. They had tried successfully to cultivate everything to the uttermost which could be used for human food or could give innocent gratification to a refined taste. They taught agriculture and they taught gardening. They were the first people to surround their homesteads with flower beds, with groves, with trim parterres, with the finest turf, to improve fruit trees, to seek out and perfect edible roots and herbs, at once for man and cattle. We owe to the Dutch that scurvy and leprosy have been banished from England; that continuous crops have taken the place of barren fallows; that the true rotation of crops has been discovered and perfected; that the population of these islands has been increased, and that the cattle and sheep in England are ten times what they were in numbers and three times what they were in size and quality. Even now the ancient agricultural skill of the Hollander is not extinct. The gardeners of Haarlem still purvey roots and bulbs of flowers for the civilized world, and there is much which the English agriculturist of the present day could learn with advantage from the industry, patience, and skill of the Dutch farmer, and perhaps will learn, when England is relieved from the curse of her present land system and her tenant farmers till the land under the same guarantees as the Dutchman does."

It would seem from this quotation that England changed her agriculture from the old-fashioned style of raising staple crops to the more lucrative and highly developed farming known by us as "market gardening." I think that it is one of the most important subjects connected with the study of agriculture-this matter of market gardening. I can see that it is very important to detail intelligent students or committees of students from each class to study the methods of the market gardeners who live in the suburbs of the nearest large cities. The States remote from cities show a much less profitable farming than those States whose farmers reside in the neighborhood of the great cities. Some years ago I found that the farmers of Maine averaged about $300 a family, counting their total productions at market prices; while the farmers of Connecticut averaged only a little less than $600 a year, because of their nearness to New York and its densely populated suburbs. What an interesting seminarium or college conference could be held with a class of agricultural students who discussed in a round-table style the report of a committee of their classmates who had been inquiring into the market gardens and ascertaining what crops are raised and in what order of succession; how many in the year; how the gardeners meet the first demands of the market in the spring; how they use forcing houses; how they handle transportation; how they get to market; how they livethat is to say, how they sleep and eat while on the way to the city and while there. All these little practical items become interesting and suggestive when discussed in this way. The uneducated person lives and acts, but does not think about the method of his living and acting. School education sets the individual at once to considering the method in which things are done. What an interesting thing it would be to compare the methods of market gardeners in New Orleans, Cincinnati, Boston, New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, etc. Set to study these processes, the students of the agricultural college become centers of information and directive power for their neighborhoods when they return as graduates to their homes.

It has been found that university extension stands in need of endowment much more than the regular teaching work of the colleges of the country. There should be fellowships founded by wealthy men interested in agriculture, so that young men of genius may repair to the college on these fellowships and have their necessary expenses all provided for. This is the one country of the world for endowment of educational institutions by private munificence. I presume that each college president knows of certain persons who would be glad to erect monuments for their families in the shape of scholarships in the State university, if they were sure that the money would increase the practical acumen of students who seek higher education. I believe that in this direction large endowments may be expected in the near future, and that a proper account of the practical work done by agricultural students when published in the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Education will be found the best means of attracting from men of wealth numerous endowments for the purpose of founding fellowships in agriculture. Many of the wealthy men of this country look askance at the liberal education furnished in our colleges and universities. Many have devoted large sums to establish nondescript institutes, with the hope that they would better fit young men for industry and the practical demands of life. They want something, but they do not know how to obtain what they want. I believe that it is in the future of these land-grant colleges, founded for agricultural and mechanical instruction, to solve this problem and to hold up for the would-be practical philanthropists a kind of education which makes the most of the talents of the youth and to stimulate him to original investigation and to lead him onward into the necessary abstruse and highly technical studies which are necessary in order to endow him with power to solve the highest problems. I have ventured to make these remarks in order to show more clearly what kind of contributions I should like from the presidents and professors of agricultural colleges who will kindly undertake to record for me these items of progress in the development of the pedagogical form for the new branches of instruction.