Repository: UIHistories Project: Dedication - Ag Building [PAGE 7]

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special uses; a complete philosophical, chemical, anatomical, and industrial apparatus; a general cabinet, embracing everything1 that relates to, illustrates, or facilitates any one of the industrial arts. To facilitate the increase and practical application and diffusion of knowledge, the professors should conduct, each in his own department, a continual series of annual experiments. Let the professors of physiology and entomology be ever abroad at the proper seasons, with the needful apparatus for seeing all things visible and invisible, and scrutinizing the latent causes of all those blights, blasts, rots, rusts, and mildews which so often destroy the choicest products of industry, and thereby impair health, wealth, and comfort of millions of our fellow-men. Let the professor of chemistry carefully analyze the various soils and products of the state, retain specimens, give instructions, and report on their various qualities, adaptations, and deficiencies. Let similar experiments be made in all other interests of agriculture and mechanic or chemical art. It is believed by many intelligent men t h a t from one-third to one-half the annual products of this state are annually lost from ignorance on the above topics. And it can scarcely be doubted that in a few years the entire cost of the whole institution would be annually saved to the state in the above interests alone, aside from all its other benefits, intellectual, moral, social, and pecuniary." Realizing the deficiency of available information on these subjects, he added: " I should have said, also, that a suitable industrial library should be at once procured, did not all the world know such a thing to be impossible, and that one of the first and most important duties of the professors of such institutions will be to begin to create, at this late hour, a proper practical literature and series of text books for the industrial classes. "As regards the professors, they should, of course, not only be men of the most eminent, practical ability in their several departments, but their connection with the institution should be rendered so fixed and stable as to enable them to carry through such designs as they may form, or all the peculiar benefits of the system would be lost." That he spoke as a prophet is shown by the following quo* tation: "As matters now are, the world has never adopted any