Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1871 [PAGE 281]

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273 work, forest planting or the care of green houses. We have all of these departments, indeed, in successful operation in a small way. We have a market garden and a nursery, and a large fruit plantation— perhaps as large a variety in our orchard as will be found in any one orchard in the country. There are about 3,000 trees and about 1,400 varieties in apples. We have several hundred varieties of pears, and a considerable collection of the small and other fruits. We have the trees there in nursery, or already in field, and have a forest plantation to experiment with, and some thirty sorts of timber trees, selected by the best authorities as being promising for timber groves on the prairies. We have also green houses which are now particularly under the care of the young ladies. We have also a course in mechanical engineering, a course in civil engineering, and some who have begun the elementary parts in a course of mining engineering. We have a course in architecture, and two or three students have entered, and we are making provision for a full development of the course. We have a course of applied chemistry besides the analytical course, and we have also a commercial course. The teacher is a gentleman who was for some time a teacher in one of the commercial colleges, but of more liberal culture than many of them,, and gives instruction in the branches suitable to fit a man for commercial life. We have, in addition to that, a military course partly developed. The students in the military course have simply been in some text books in tactics. I should have said at the outset that we adopted the voluntary plan as to study; that is, we threw the whole field as far as we could open, and allowed students to select their own courses and their own studies in the course. We have several recommended courses that we put in the hands of the students, and say to them if they have no choice of their own they had better take that, and they have largely followed the course advised They are most of them four year courses. We do not confer degrees. The members of the Legislature visited us during the last winter, and asked the question whether we wished to have our law of organization modified so as to give us the power to confer degrees. I told them I had no care in the matter; that for a year or two, until our reputation was perhaps wider, it might be a little benefit to us ; in the long run we hoped to make the certificate we gave of equal value, and did not care to confer honorary degrees. W e have a sort of diploma which states that the student holding it has pursued a partial, or lull course, in the different departments he has chosen, and attained a certain percentage of scholarship in the studies mentioned, and there is —26