s is
nowhere else enjoyed, to found a college or higher institution of
learning upon the general and admitted ignorance of the people in the
given department? or is it wiser, by elementary training and the
universal diffusion of better ideas, to make the establishment of the
college the necessity of the culture previously given? Every new school,
not a college, makes the demand for the college course greater than it
was before; and the advance made in our public schools increases the
students in the colleges and the university. We build from the primary
school to the college; and without the primary school and its
dependents,--the grammar, high school, and academy,--the colleges would
cease to exist. This view of education supports the statement that an
agricultural college is not the foundation of a system of agricultural
training, but a result that is to be reached through a preliminary and
elementary course of instruction. What shall that course be? I say,
first, the establishment of town or neighborhood societies of farmers
and others interested in agriculture. These societies ought to be
auxiliary to the county societies, and they never can become their
rivals or enemies unless they are grossly perverted in their management
and purposes. As such societies must be mutual and voluntary in their
character, they can be established in any town where there are twenty,
ten, or even five persons who are disposed to unite together. Its object
would, of course, be the advancement of practical agriculture; and it
would look to theories and even to science as means only for the
attainment of a specified end. The exercises of such societies would
vary according to the tastes and plans of the members and directors; but
they would naturally provide for discussions and conversations among
themselves, lectures from competent persons, the establishment of a
library, and for the collection of models and drawings of domestic
animals, models of varieties of fruit, specimens of seeds, grasses, and
grains, rocks, minerals, and soils. The discussions and conversations
would be based upon the actual observation and experience of the
members; and agriculture would at once become better understood and more
carefully practised by each person who intended to contribute to the
exercises of the meeting.

Until the establishment of agricultural journals, there were no means by
which the results of individual experience could be made known to the