Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1868 [PAGE 19]

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"Thus, too, the whole State, and eventually the whole Union, will become one vast agricultural, experimental farm; and while producing one crop for our present wealth and support, evolving, as it should do, year by year, scientific knowledge, at once diffused through the annual reports over all classes of society, increasing the intelligence of the workmen, and the fertility and capacity of the soil, year by year and enhancing the products and wealth of the State, in a geometrical ratio, to the latest generations to come. This would be intelligently using the soil, and using the continent as it ought to be used, for the good of mankind—in body and in spirit— in intelligence and in art—in wealth and in power, and not simply living on the soil, much as the pigs do, and rooting a bare living out of it, without social co-operation, or plan, or forecast. " Thus we should evolve a real agricultural science—evolve wealth, and capacity, and power for all other needful sciences and arts whatever. I know of no sane man who doubts that such an organization of our Industrial Universities, all over the land, would increase our wealth by millions, and increase our intellectual and social activity and power in a still greater proportion. The sun never shone on such a nation, and such a power, as this would soon be, with such facilities of public advancement and improvement, put into full and vigorous operation. Set all the millions of eyes in this great Republic to watching, and intelligently observing and thinking, and there is no secret of nature or art we cannot find out; no disease of man or beast we cannot understand; no evil we cannot remedy; no obstacle we cannot surmount; nothing that lies in the power of man to door to understand, that cannot be understood and done."

It will be seen from this that large results were expected by the framer8 of the bill, from the official labors of the Corresponding Secretary; and it is to be hoped that, as the income of the Institution increases, and more means can be spared for the purpose, that this expectation may not be disappointed ; as the office can be made, in the hands of the authorities of the University, a most efficient channel of communicating the results of scientific research to practical men, and receiving in turn the isolated facts of experience, whose combination and comparison furnish the best basis of agricultural and mechanical science. Under the difficulties springing from recent organization, limited means and immature plans, but little could be done or reasonably expected from the efforts of the Correspgnding Secretary for the first year after the organization of the University under its charter ; and the little that has here been attempted and accomlished may be regarded rather as an indication of the kind of facts wanted, than as any important collection of them. The large part of the report necessarily occupied by the record of the preliminary labors of the Board of Trustees, has excluded a good deal of matter of a statistical and scientific character, col. lected for insertion in this report, but now laid over for the next