Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1868 [PAGE 6]

EXTRACTED TEXT FROM PAGE:

VI

These quotations from the National and State laws upon the subject, show with sufficient clearness the general duties and requirements of the Board m of Trustees, and of the Corresponding and Recording Secretaries in reporting their acts. The very comprehensive wording of the statute concerning the duties of the Corresponding Secretary, however, make it desirable to get more precisely at the meaning of the framers of the State statute. This law was originally drawn up by a committee consisting of Wm. H. Van Epps, Prof. J. B. Turner,:A. B. McConnell, B. GL Roots and John P . Reynolds, appointed at the State Fair held at Decatur in 1864, and was presented to the Legislature as the expression of the views of the farmers of Illinois in 1865 and 18f>7. Although changed in other and important particulars, the general plan of organization and working was left untouched ; and I therefore quote irom Professor Turner, who doubtless had an important part in drafting the bill, his statement of the intended function of the University in its relation to practical agriculture and arts, and the duties of the Corresponding Secretary as a means of intercourse between academic science and practical art. In an address delivered at the County Fair at Monmouth, October 4, 1866, Prof. Turner said:

"The charter implies that gratuitous experiments in agriculture and the arts should be annually made under direction of the Board, by the County Superintendents, of each crop or special interest, in all the counties in the State ; and annual reports made to the Institution, and by it to all other Institutions of the kind in the Union, and to the central department at the Capital, according to the terms of the giant, and much in the same way as the monthly reports are now made from every county to the same department. " F o r example: In each of the one hundred counties of Illinois, for one year, gome simple, practical, definite experiment would be tried by an intelligent superintendent for that county, on the corn crop, on a small piece of ground: by another superintendent on the wheat crop: by others on diseases of cattle, and hogs, and flocks; by others on the green crops, the garden and orchard; by others on all sorts of mechanical tools, implements and machines; and on the new composition, strength and quality of materials, etc., etc. In short, whatever the Trustees and Faculty should wish to see put to a general, practical, thorough test, on all the varied soils, and affecting all the varied interests of eaeh county in the State, would be ordered for practical trial on a small and cheap, but sufficient scale, in all the counties of the State, to forever settle that point, as a matter of absolute knowledge or science, and not as mere guess work. Thus the science of agriculture and the sciences of the mechanic arts, will advance, almost without cost, more rapidly toward a state of absolute perfection, than any other sciences ever did, or could, under ordinary conditions.