agricultural colleges. They
taught the peasantry of the surrounding country how best to grow their
crops and what to grow. Because of their wide affiliations they were
enabled to secure seeds of various kinds, and stock for breeding
purposes, and so were able to teach the people what was best for
particular neighborhoods, and not only show them how to raise it, but
actually supply them with the necessary initial materials. It became a
proverb that the monks and their people were the best farmers. When we
ourselves were ignorant of scientific farming, we did not appreciate
what the monks had done for agriculture. Now that our soil is becoming
exhausted by unscientific and wasteful farming, the foundation of
agricultural colleges leads the men who have studied the subject to
appreciate what the monks really accomplished. Professor Draper not
only cannot find anything good to say of the monks, but he can
scarcely find anything bitter enough to say of them. On the other hand
President Goodell, who has studied the situation from his point of
view very carefully, can scarcely find words strong enough to praise
them. He concluded his address as follows:

"My friends, I have outlined to you in briefest manner to-day the
work of these grand old monks during the period of 1500 years. They
saved agriculture when no one else would save it, they practised it
under a new life and new conditions when no one else dared undertake
it. They advanced it along every line of theory and practice, and
when they perished they left a void which generations have not
filled."

In the light of these few quotations even it is easy to see that
Professor Draper's book is really quite an amazing work to have come
from the hand of a man widely read, acknowledged as an authority in
certain subjects by his contemporaries and, above all, because the
author seems to have thought that he had quite exhausted his subject.
Here, for instance, is a portion of the paragraph in which he
summarizes the beginnings of science in modern Europe (page 298).

"The science of the Arabians followed the invading track of their
literature, which had come into Christendom by two routes--the south
of France and Sicily. Favored by the exile of the Popes to Avignon,
and by the Great Schism, it made good its foothold in upper Italy.
The Aristotelian or Inductive philosophy, clad in the Saracenic
costume that Averroes had given it, made many secret and