Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1870 [PAGE 10]

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est shown in this department enforce the importance of giving it the aid which the Board of Trustees asked two years ago, but which the General Assembly did not consider it best to grant. It seems specially desirable that the State or private munificence should furnish the requisite presses, types, etc., for a printing office and bindery, which would furnish farther employment for students, and economise the expenses of the University. R. Hoe & Co., of New York, have presented the Cornell University with a steam cylinder press valued at $3,250. The example is worthy of imitation; and the fact of an University press at Cornell today, whose foreman, compositors, pressmen and engineer, are all matriculated students, and whose w>rk is done well, proves that the idea is practicable. Thus far, I have spoken of the work of the University, and its wants in the direction of teaching and furnishing the means of self-support to the young men and women who are thronging its lecture and recitation rooms. It may be proper, also, to say somewhat of a work not less important, but hitherto somewhat impracticable. I mean that of originating"knowledge—especiallyin agriculture—by observation and experiment, and the ultimate elimination of a science of agriculture from the facts so collected. The charter of the University looks to this, and makes it the duty of the Corresponding Secretary of the Board of Trustees to issue circulars, directions for procuring needful materials for conducting experiments, and,eliciting instructive information from persons in various counties, selected for that purpose, and skilled in any branch of Agricultural, Mechanical and Industrial Art; and to do all other acts needful to enable him to prepare an annual report regarding the progess of the University in each department thereof—recording any improvements and experiments made, with their costs and results, and such other matters, including State, industrial, and economical statistics, as may be supposed useful. The desirability of doing all this, is sufficiently manifest. There has been on the part of the State Agricultural Society, and of the State Board of Equalization, urgent and repeated requests made for statistics; and the importance of experimentation, if less urged, is still strongly felt. But if there be no power to require statistics, the duty of collecting them can avail little, and must be limited to recording and reprinting what has already appeared elsewhere.