by the perfectness to which he has developed in breadth of view, clear reasoning, good judgment, tolerance, high ideals, sensitiveness to art and nature, devotion to service.

In the past fifty years or more we have been adding to college courses one subject after another. Our educational structure has been growing by the process of accretion. We have added medicine, engineering, mechanics, and other professions, but at last we have introduced a leaven into the very center of the lump. This ferment is education by means of agriculture.

Most of our special and technical college education aims to develop the professional and occupational side of the man in order that he himself may receive more reward for his effort and reach a higher place amongst his fellows. It is concerned only secondarily and often remotely with the man or woman who actually performs the ultimate labor. In agriculture, however, the case is quite different, because the man on the farm is the one who himself performs the labor or is immediately responsible for it. The whole purpose of agriculture-education, if it is true to its opportunity, is to reach the last man in the terms of his daily life. This is why our leading colleges of agriculture are so vitalized with the social spirit. Here is an educational process that attempts to reach the real fundamental strata and the broad human levels. It cares less about professionalism and occupationalism than it does about the development of all the folk who live on the land, to the end that a new rural civilization may be produced. Education by means of agriculture, therefore, is not merely to add one more thing to our educational institutions: it is to remake much of our education. In this great result it will be seconded in a very effective way by the complementary movement to educate workers in all other industrial fields.

All this may sound like the vagary of a specialist, but I am willing to wait the issue. The movement will develop not only the individual but will relate him to his responsibility to the welfare of the outermost man and woman. It is dominated

and directed by the idea of rendering service. It takes hold of the real problems of the people in the places where the people live.

This education by means of agriculture, which has been slowly formulating and finding itself for a century, has now become visible, and in my opinion it is the most important single contemporaneous contribution to the method and outlook of education in general. You will find it redirecting our educational thought in the time just ahead of us.

In respect to its technical method, education by means of agriculture introduces observation and discussion of objects, phenomena and affairs as they actually exist in their own places. It takes the student to the field, the farm, the forest, the stable, the dairy, the harvest, the market. It is simple, direct, and devoid of too much pedagogical theory and indecision. It endeavors to make the common things of life worth while; and we know that as soon as these things are worth while, the most important step in their improvement has already begun.

Of course it goes without saying that the effectiveness of agriculture as a means of training depends on the way in which it is conducted in any particular case. We may expect to find loose, inadequate, and ineffective teaching of agriculture as of other subjects, and even more so, because the subject is new and the educational methods are not yet well worked out. It is possible to make a course in agriculture in the high school and the college just as definite, organic, and sound as a course in chemistry, physics, Latin, calculus, or civics. Until this is accomplished we cannot expect the best results from the work, but this realization is coming more rapidly than many of us are aware.

The experiences of the leading colleges of agriculture illustrate distinctly what may be accomplished with these subjects. The old department of "agriculture" in the institution is now broken into concrete lines or subjects that demand the most definite and painstaking work, and that call for the exercise of

great diversity of powers on the part of the student. I may mention, for example, such subjects as chemistry in its many relations with agriculture; animal husbandry, meat and milk production, stock-judging, nutrition and principles of feeding; entomology and other phases of biology; dairy industry, with milk tests, butter-making, cheese-making, dairy mechanics, bacteriology and the like; pomology, floriculture, greenhouse construction, market-gardening, and so on; the breeding of plants and animals; meteorology; studies of soils in their physical, chemical, and biological relations, soil surveys and charting; plant physiology in its relation to the growing of crops; plant and animal diseases; poultry husbandry in many phases; bee-keeping; home economics in its rural relation, including food, sanitation, nutrition, house-planning, household art and management, and the like; rural economy with historical, social, and economic relations; rural architecture; rural art and landscape gardening; forestry; rural normal work of many kinds; and other subjects. From this great body of subjects and problems it is possible to develop college and postgraduate courses of instruction that are as concrete, thorough, and scientific as those in other departments of human knowledge. From this field, also, general colleges and universities will be able to choose excellent subjects for the curriculum. Of course all such instruction, if it leads to regular college honors, must rest on fundamental work in English, physics, chemistry, geology, biology, drawing, and the like.

It is not contended by anybody that we have yet attained to perfection in the organization and study of any of these subjects, but progress is making rapidly, and we have now reached the point at which we are certain that this group of subjects may be made effective means of training men and women for the work of life, whether they are to be actual farmers or not.

The effectiveness of any study depends more on the way in which it is organized and taught than on the particular subjectmatter itself. That is to say, if one person were to teach both

Greek and farm crops, and were equally prepared in the subject-matter of both, he probably would give as sound an educational course in one as in the other.

I hope that we are now fairly away from the idea that the value of a subject as training, or as a worthy object of pursuit, is in proportion to its remoteness from the affairs of life. I do not like the classification of certain subjects as "pure science," with its implication of certain other subjects as "impure science." All science is science, and all intellectual effort is intellectual effort, whether it has immediate application or whether it does not. Its effectiveness as a means of mental training does not depend on its utility or nonutility, although great difference may result in the outlook of the student and in his usefulness to the world from the pursuit of one phase or the other. I want to have equal recognition for all thorough and conscientious study, whether by teachers or students, in whatever field of knowledge or endeavor they may be expending themselves. We need carefully to guard the method of our instruction to the end that nothing may be thrown together, or be sensational or superficial or exploitational. I want particularly in the agricultural work to be sure that those who are fitted in the colleges to teach agriculture in the schools and other institutions shall be thoroughly well grounded in their science and in their philosophy, so that the work for which they may be responsible shall be of equal grade and intensity with any other work.

Now that education by means of agriculture is coming to be popular, all kinds of plans are being tried or discussed. Persons do not seem to realize that we have had about one hundred years of experience in the United States in agricultural education, and that this experience ought to point the way to success, or at least to the avoiding of serious errors. The agricultural colleges have come up through a long and difficult route, and their present success is not accidental, nor is it easy to duplicate or imitate. First and last about every conceivable plan has been tried by them, or by others in their time or preceding them;

and this experience ought to be utilized by the institutions that are now being projected in all parts of the country.

To teach agriculture merely by giving a new direction or vocabulary to botany, chemistry, geology, physics, and the like is not to teach agriculture at all, although it may greatly improve these subjects themselves. To put a college department of agriculture in the hands of some good science teacher in a general faculty with the idea that he can cover the agricultural work and at the same time keep up his own department is wholly ineffective (except temporarily) and out of character with the demands of the twentieth century. To suppose that "agriculture" is merely one subject for a college course, to be sufficiently represented by a "chair," is to miss the point of modern progress. To give only laboratory and recitation courses may be much better than nothing, but land teaching, either as a part of the institution itself or on adjacent farms, must be incorporated with the customary formal work if the best results are to be secured. To make a school farm pay for itself and for a regular school at the same time is impossible, unless the school is a very poor one; and yet this old fallacy is alive at the present day. To have a distant farm to visit and to look at, in order to "apply" the "teachings" of chemistry, botany, and the like, falls far short of real agricultural instruction. To develop a "model farm" that shall be a pattern to the multitude in exact farming is an exploded notion; that there are many farmers' farms that are better adapted to such purpose (the demonstration farm is the modern adaptation of the idea, and it is educationally sound) is a well known fact.

To teach agriculture of college grade requires not only persons who know the subject, but an organization well informed on the educational administration that is needed. There must be a body of experience in this line of work behind any teaching of a college and postgraduate plane that shall be really useful; when this body of experience does not exist, the work must necessarily grow slowly and be under the most expert direction.