UIHistories Project: A History of the University of Illinois by Kalev Leetaru
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Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1871 [PAGE 296]

Caption: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1871
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288 ought to be fully satisfied. T think there has been nothing more practical or more valuable for getting our general agricultural practice upon a scientific basis, than those works by Prof. Johnson. I think this country owes a great debt to Sheffield Scientific School, and I think Mr. Murtfeldt himself wi]l take that view of it. But I don't think it is right to attack Yale College or any other institution that is doing as much in a different way towards agricultural science, with the plea that it is unpractical. Mr. Murtfeldt—I did not mean to be so understood, sir. I simply quoted Prof. Gilman. Mr. Flagg—I am a Yale man, and I sympathize with young Yale, too. I believe that Yale is all right, and so is Harvard. I believe, although those are classical schools, so-called, that they are doing their work, and doing it well for the practical men in this country. Mr. Denison—The law of Congress places the matter in this form. These Institutions are endowed to teach (not excluding other scientific and other classical learning), such branches of learning as relate to the Agricultural and Mechanical Arts, in order to promote a liberal, practical education in the industry of life. I suppose that Mr. Murtfeldt will not exclude the classics? Mr. Murtfeldt—Certainly not, sir. Mr. Welch—I am a little befogged in regard to the exact distinction drawn between the scientific and the practical. I think I have never been able to see it. 1 think that the usual distinction (which I do not believe is well founded), is about thus: There are a class of men who have no knowledge of abstract science, who have become, by long experience, skillful in the manipulations of the farm, and they call these practical, and they have knowledge, no doubt, of an exceedingly important part of farming. Then there are men, on the other hand, who work in the laboratory, who are skillful botanists, and who have accumulated, by life-long industry, great knowledge in these departments. Now, I hold that those men that determine the principles that can be applied on the farm, and that indeed form the basis of all genuine progress on the farm, are just as practical as the other class. [Applause.] So I have long doubted the wisdom of giving to one class, viz; the workers—I mean the muscular workers—all the credit of having the only practical men, and on the other hand, I have doubted the justice of living the intensely earnest workers in the laboratory and in science, the credit or discredit of being the only theoretical men. Of course, the so-called practical men—the muscular workers—cannot do without the scientific workers, because there would not be any great or