Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1871 [PAGE 319]

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311 tural society embraced all husbandry. How is it ? We have found that it is necessary that there should be sub-divisions in husbandry and that different interests should be cared for by different independent associations. You find that your breeders find an association > with profit to themselves and with profit to the country. You find that horticulturists have organized an association, independent of agriculture, which is doing a great and good work, and people in general will look carefully at this system of experimentation for the purpose of elementary knowledge, science with agriculture, and will find that it is so vast, and so grand, that they will unite with it and make it a broad and a great organization. It is necessary that the subject should be carefully considered in the convention. It is necessary to take all the time and all the attention that the members of such a convention can devote to it. It is a larger subject, perhaps, than many consider it to be, until they have actually got into it and found what it is enlarging to. And I would therefore insist that there is enough to do for an organization which has this specifically for its object; there is enough to do in the way of organization and experimentation, in these different institutions organized under the land grant, to carry on the organization and make it very interesting and very profitable in a very scientific point of view. There is another question that I wish to call your attention to. The manner in which this convention has been called, and the words of the call, have not been the means of bringing together representatives of the governing powers—the trustee power which governs these land grant institutions. It has brought together the representatives of the Presidents of the colleges, representatives from the chairs of agriculture, and it has brought Sv>me others—some experimental farmers, etc. Now it seems to me eminently unfit and improper that this convention should take the responsibility of organizing a body such as has been spoken of here, which would have under consideration all things connected with this new education. Such a body is needed; such a body is eminently proper and eminently necessary in the United States. Such an organization has never been formed and it is a wonder to me that it has not been formed; but that this Convention could take steps to form it, it seems to me hardly possible under the call. We can take steps here which are eminently proper to form an organization such as 1 have spoken of, for the purpose of organizing experiments. Mr. Welch—I perceive that we have departed largely from the spirit of this call, in the discussion of the various interests outside of experimental work. I would ask our friends who would advocate the or-