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Michigan State Agricultural College BY PRESIDENT ABBOT
Some of its members, no doubt, were educated men from the east. Journals of agriculture were very few, but Sir Humphrey Davy, who began lecturing in England in 1801. and Boussingault. in France, who began writing in 1844, and others had caused a new era to dawn upon agriculture. These men were aware of this, and were anxious that agriculture should participate in the enormous advantages that science was conferring upon mechanics and the simpler arts. There were others, now well-to-do farmers, and men of influence, who had hewn their farms out of the forests, and desired that their children should possess the education which they lacked. They remembered the time when the men of chief influence in Massachusetts and New York were farmers, and felt that in the hurry of later times, in an age of machinery, of division of labor, and the growth of cities, the farmers, as a class, were losing influence, and they believed in education as the equalizer of the classes of society. The influence of both these kinds of ideas and sentiments is plainly seen in the discussions of those times, and in the early workings of the college.
From this State agricultural society, and its indefatigable secretary, Mr. Holmes, came the memorials to the legislature; the personal examination of the plans of making use for agricultural education, of the normal school and university; the advocacy of an independent college upon a farm; the selection, under restrictions, of the site, and subsequently, in 1861, the advocacy of a separate board—the State Board of Agriculture—for the control of the college. Just before the opening of the college to students, the society gave to the institution its library. Two, at least of the members of the State
Board of Agriculture—Messrs.
Michigan State
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