Page:Texas A&M 6th annual catalogue, session 1881-82.djvu/11



The Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas owes its foundation and endowment to the act of U. S. Congress approved July 2, 1862, amended July 23, 1864, and to a joint resolution of the Legislature of Texas, approved Nov. 1, 1866, an act of the same body approved April 17, 1871, and finally to a provision of the state constitution of 1876, all of which are appended to this catalogue.

Under these acts an the special laws of the legislature growing out of them the first board of directors met at Austin July 15, 1876, and proceeded to organize the College.

At this time the reaction against the exclusive study of the classics to the neglect of natural science had scarcely been felt in the South. There were but two or three institutions in all the southern states that gave unqualified prominence to those studies which bear directly upon the manual occupations of men. The most learned and cultured citizens as a rule admitted but one course of training as proper for education, namely, that which leads through a thorough course of classic reading to the professions of law, medicine and divinity, or to a life of literary ease. With such a sentiment widely prevailing it is not surprising that this college was organized, like nearly all those created by the same act of congress, as a classical and mathematical school. In the first faculty, consisting of a president and five professors, two of the professors alone were to teach those branches of science for the development of which the college was developed. The vast subject of agriculture, with its great