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 297]

Caption: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1871
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289 genuine progress without the application of scientific discovery to the work on the farm, in the garden, or in the work-shop. Indeed, there could not be any real progress without these scientific, practical men. And, on the other hand, the scientific, practical men never could reduce their experiments, their discoveries, to practice on the farm without the muscular workers. So I believe that all these men are practical men, all of them. I heard yesterday a sentiment that I (and I speak with all deference to the speaker) did not like. I have forgotten who the speaker was, but the sentiment was in derogation or deprecation of the idea that a school should have a sprinkling of agriculture. If I may not be too egotistical in reference to our own laboratory, I would say that we have there a two and a-half years' course in analytical chemistry—in experimental chemistry, at any rate. Well, I might call that a "sprinkling of agriculture," and a pretty large sprinkling, too. It is true that the analyses do not always point right to the farm, but they always have a bearing upon it, and the truths of science are intimately connected together. You cannot teach a boy one experiment in the laboratory, or any manipulation of the laboratory that is not related, more or less, indirectly to the work on the farm. Now, if I should stand at the head of an institution of learning wherein the whole scope of the work was simply out-door experiments, or wherein art was taught simply, the manipulations of the farm and the nicer processes of the garden, with science left out and the laboratory left out, I should resign in utter disgust. I could not run such an institution. Nor do I believe that those institutions can ever be successful, or that they can ever be practical in the widest sense of the term, unless they are founded upon genuine attainments in science. And then the practice, as it is called, or the art, which is better, comes in, and no man can be a genuine artiste in agriculture, or in the garden, or in pomology, or in anything else, unless his labors are founded upon large attainments in science. Mr. Hilgard—There is one point made by Mr. Murtfeldt which I desire to notice, and it is this : He says that after all, the main object, or what is meant, is experiments and experiment stations. This would seem to imply that we really have made no genuine progress in agriculture, or rather that we have nothing to teach that would benefit the farmer. I do not think that Agricultural science deserves that imputation; nor do I think that experiments are at present our primary object. It is the popular prejudice that they are to be so. I do not think we ought to encourage this popular prejudice. I think that while experiments —28