Repository: UIHistories Project: Dedication - Ag Building [PAGE 58]

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55 worthy of the most gifted and highly educated young* man. A four-years' course in agriculture, or in any of its specialized branches, today gives a man not only a training for agriculture but in and by agriculture. It gives him such a professional training as to fit him as a bread winner of the highest type. When he has finished* he is fitted to do something somebody wants done. He has not only received a theoretical knowledge of the laws of nature, but such a practical knowledge of their application that he can successfully use them on the farm, in the dairy, in the orchard, or in the garden. Not only are the hand and the eye trained, but through the hand and eye the mind is trained. In other words, the course in agriculture offers a sound education. Its graduates are not only educated farmers, but educated men. I am not ready to assert that the mental drill received from instruction by technical agriculture, as at present taught, is equal to that received by the study of Greek, Latin, or Calculus. It is freely recognised that the colleges of agriculture have large opportunities in this regard. The men who are teaching these subjects have had literally to dig their subject out of the ground and have, in some cases, been so absorbed in acquiring knowledge that they have neglected the pedagogic methods of impart* ing it. But I am ready to assert that the young men who are now being graduated from the courses in agriculture are, let the reasons be what they may, the peers of the graduates of any of the courses of our land grant colleges and their subsequent work is showing them to be such. I am conscious that I have used a great deal of time in order to say to the young man, that if you want a sound education, if you want an education that will fit you for a useful life, if you want an education worthy of the mental capacity of an Edison or a Pasteur, you can find it in a course in agriculture* If it will not serve your purpose in after life, do not take it. There are plenty of other courses that will give you as good a training* The variety of courses in the state universities is such as to suit the most fastidious* But if you are interested in the problems underlying agriculture, if your artistic instinct leads you to pre* far producing, living, pulsating models of plants and animals, instead of reproducing their counterfeit on canvas, if your scientific bent is towards organic rather than metallurgic chemistry*