Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/191

Rh this sentiment in our educated young men. The author of that remark is Horatio Seymour. It struck me powerfully as sound and just, and, shortly after the establishment of the Cornell University, the trustees adopted a rule by which every student in every department—as a condition for graduation—must hear a course of lectures on general agriculture.

I am glad to state that, although the rule was received with some grumbling at first, that grumbling stopped immediately after the first lecture. Said a student to me at that time, "These lectures make us all wish to get hoes, and go at scratching up the ground at once." The lecturer for this general purpose is John Stanton Gould. May his interruption by ill health, which has deprived us of his service the past year, be but temporary! Long may he be spared to the University and the State, for whose good he has so steadily and so earnestly labored!

But suppose that no young men came forward to take agricultural studies, the new education would still tell powerfully on agriculture. Think you that we can send out year after year—as we did last year—a hundred graduates from all our various departments, whose powers of observation have been trained and whose real knowledge of subjects bearing on agriculture has been extended by close study in Botany, Animal Physiology, Geology, and Chemistry, without its telling ultimately on the progress of agriculture?

But suppose that not one student was even thus educated, I maintain that the State and nation would receive more than the equivalent of its endowment.

Look at a few figures. The last census gives certain agricultural statistics whose magnitude is almost oppressive. The value of farm productions in the United States, in the year 1870, was considerably over $2,000,000,000.

The value of farm productions in the State of New York, the same year, was over $250,000,000.

Does not common-sense tell us that we can well afford to make a little outlay to promote any sciences which may help such a vast interest? If in the course of years, in all these laboratories and experiments, some one useful idea shall be struck out, it would repay our endowments a thousand-fold.

Says Emerson, "The true poet is an inspired prophet." Did you ever think what an inspiration lies in the poet's declaration that "the greatest benefactor of mankind is he who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before?" If not, look at the census returns showing the enormous value of the hay-crop of these Northern States.

Knowledge of Nature—coming by research and observation in the laboratory and the field—these are to give us finally our "two blades of grass," and multitudes of other benefactions to our race not less precious.

The Sheffield Scientific School at Yale College has not a single