tricate scientific questions
that relate to agriculture and to carry on experiments that are of more
obvious and more immediate practical application to existing conditions
in the various states. There is one of these stations in each state and
territory, besides a number of stations supported by state funds. The
Department of Agriculture at Washington has also developed during the
last ten years until it is performing very large service for
agriculture. Its annual expenditures aggregate eight or ten million
dollars, and it has in its employment hundreds of experts carrying on
laboratory and field research, scouring the world for plants and seeds
that may be of economic value, and assisting to control plant and animal
diseases. It is also distributing a vast amount of practical
information, put in readable form and adapted to the average farmer. Its
work of seeking to extend the markets of our agricultural products is
one of its notable successes.

Agricultural schools have been talked about for a century, and during
the early part of the last century several were started. The first
permanent agricultural college was opened in 1857, in Michigan. The
Morrill Act of 1862 gave rise to a system of such colleges and today
there will be found one in every state and territory, besides several
for the colored people of the South. Up to 1890, these colleges had been
not wholly satisfactory and the farming class was not patronizing very
fully their agricultural courses. The fault belonged both to the college
and to the farmers. The farmers were skeptical of the value of
agricultural education, and the colleges were often out of sympathy with
the real needs of the farmers, and in fact found it difficult to break
away from the pedagogical ideals of the old educational regime. Since
1890, however, there has been a complete change of sentiment in this
respect, particularly in the Middle West. There the "land-grant"
colleges, whether separate colleges or whether organized as colleges of
state universities, are securing magnificent buildings for agriculture,
are offering fully equipped courses, and are enrolling as students some
of the best men in college, whom they are educating not only for
agricultural teachers and experimenters but also for practical farmers.
Of course, there are many grave problems connected with this subject,
many farmers who do not yet respond to the call for educated
agriculturists, and some colleges that do no