Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 430]

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Industrial Universities for the People

889

It is believed by many intelligent men, that 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. The APPARATUS required for such work is obvious. There should be grounds devoted to a botanical and common garden, to orchards and fruit yards, to appropriate lawns and promenades, in which the beautiful art of landscape gardening could be appropriately applied and illustrated, to all varieties of pasture, meadow, and tillage needful for the successful prosecution of the needful annual experiments. And on these grounds should be collected and exhibited a sample of every variety of domestic animal, and of every tree, plant, and vegetable that can minister to the health, wealth, or taste and comfort of the people of the State; their nature, habits, merits, production, improvement, culture, diseases, and accidents thoroughly scrutinized, tested, and made known to the students and to the people of the State. There should, also, be erected a sufficient number of buildings and out-buildings for all the purposes above indicated, and REPOSITORY, in which all the ordinary tools and implements of the institution should be kept, and models of all other useful implements and machines from time to time collected, and tested as they are proffered to public use. At first it would be for the interest of inventors and vendors to make such deposits. But, should similar institutions be adopted in other States, the general government ought to create in each State a general patent office, attached to the Universities, similar to the existing deposits at "Washington, thus rendering this department of mechanical art and skill more accessible to the great mass of the people of the Union. 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