| |
| |
Caption: Book - History of the University (Powell)
This is a reduced-resolution page image for fast online browsing.
EXTRACTED TEXT FROM PAGE:
462 History University of Illinois DOCUMENT NUMBER 11 EXTRACT FROM CHAMPAIGN COUNTY Urbana, Jan. 26th, 1861 A MEMORIAL DEMOCRAT, To your honorable body the General Assembly of the State of 111. We, your petitioners, of Champaign County, and State aforesaid in view of the rising importance of the agricultural interests of our state, as well as nation, and the necessity of investing that interest with intelligence, respectability, and the efficiency that science in its present stage of advancement can now endow it, do offer the following reasons, and urge through them the necessity that some provision be made during the present term of the Legislature, for a Department of Agricultural Education, under the patronage of the State, and that the same may be located in a portion of the State where educational facilities are not already supplied. There are two obvious necessities for such a branch of education: one to give a higher direction to the laboring classes of our State, and an emulation more commendable than mechanical imitation such as the laborer acquires by habitual drill; and, secondly, to make experimental science subserve the purposes of public economy. For the first object we deem it necessary not only to maintain separate chairs of instruction on the Natural Sciences, but to create and encourage, also, in association with those studies, ample demonstration in the same, from collections of the various products of the various soils, both of natural and cultivated growth; also the geological specimens of the earth's strata, the Botany of the earth, her mineralogy, conkology, and chemical transformations; of ornithology, zoology, comparative anatomy and the collation of mechanical improvements, and intellectual productions of American, genius. In a word, we hold that an Agricultural Bureau, under the State jurisdiction and support, should be thus associated with such a seminary, thereby bringing the young and inquiring mind directly in contact with the objects of his pursuit. We hold that it is the youth of
| |
