question is quite satisfactory to some minds. It fails short of being entirely satisfactory because it ignores two or three important considerations. These may be stated in the form of questions.

1. What are the motives for studying a science?

2. What are the motives for studying agriculture?

3. When is a science applied?

One other consideration must be taken into account whether one is conscious of it or not. That is, what function is the course of instruction supposed to perform for the pupil of high-school age?

First, as to the motives for the study of science. In these days science has reached so great a development in so many directions that it has in some of its phases become universal as a school study. Science does not get so much of the school time devoted to it as the languages do, but some aspect of it is taught in practically all schools. Its universality as a school subject seems to justify its claim for having educational values. Science must have a high degree of mental sustenance to have become so universal. What these mental values are need not be dwelt on here. It is enough to say that many pursue science not for the sake of any use they expect to put it to, but for the pleasure its possession gives them in their leisure and the insight it gives into the mysteries of the world of Nature about them in their daily work. In other words, . science as a study has justified itself as a cultural and humanizing study of the highest order.

Correlative with this, science has its utilitarian aspect. Whatever may be claimed for it in giving the mind freedom from prejudice, and adding to one's joy of living, science will always remain a most practical study. Its practicalness lies in its application to things that are seldom thought of as being scientific in themselves. This is especially true of the theme in hand, namely, agriculture. Agriculture, which has been carried on so many generations by men untrained in science, is the latest of the great human vocations to benefit by the message science has to offer for man's welfare. The fact that the arts of tillage and husbandry are so simple as arts discourages the attainment of a high degree of skill. The application of the principles of science or of scientific method to an occupation so wanting in skill has always met resistance. This resistance seems to grow out of the fact that the workman unschooled in the science of his craft regards his work as a thing by itself and especially as a thing apart from science.

Science in the broad sense of the term has a greater message for agriculture than for any other single human industry. To put it a little more accurately, the various sciences have a multitude of messages for the numerous arts that are included under the word agriculture. There is hardly a branch of learning included in the term science which does not stand ready with a helpful message for the advancement of agriculture. Physics in its application to tillage, chemistry in the analysis of fertilizers and animal nutrition, biology in the exemplification of the laws of life, meteorology in its seasonal control of the year's succession of activities, and geology with its productive elements, the basis of soil-study as well as of plant production, all contribute to the upbuilding of a scientific agriculture.

To weigh these different bodies of scientific knowledge and to give to each its proportionate share in the advancement of agriculture requires a mind of unusual grasp.

To contend that even the simplest elements of each of these sciences should be studied with a view to their use as applied sciences afterward would preclude the possibility of the study of agriculture in any form during the high-school period. When viewed from the standpoint of the sciences involved in it, the teaching as well as the study of agriculture becomes the most complicated educational problem the public schools have ever undertaken to master.

Instruction in agriculture has two distinct phases. One involves the process of learning the art of doing things connected with the field, the garden, the barn and feed yard, the orchard, the meadow, the wood lot, and the toolhouse. The other phase of agricultural instruction relates to the sciences on which these several arts depend for their explanation. Art and science instead of being opposed, are more intimately connected in the study of agriculture than in any other subject now offered in the schools, unless it is language. The vitality of language as a school study through the centuries is due to the intimate blending of the two arts of speaking and writing with the two sciences of grammar and logic. When we once become conscious of this indissoluble tie between the arts of communication and the sciences of human thinking, no school reform will ever lay violent hands on grammar and logic.

Agriculture is much more complex. Instead of embracing only two, it has a large group of arts. Instead of being explained by only two sciences, agriculture lays tribute on nearly every science known to man.

And when the teacher of either agriculture or of science once becomes conscious of this ganglionic tie between the agricultural arts and all of the sciences he will teach science less "for the sake of science" and more "for the service of man." Now, the knowledge embraced within the domain of a given science has, in most cases, been so well systematized that a serial group of lessons may be arranged for orderly school work with very little trouble. One lesson follows another in causal or sequential order because of the relation of their subject-matter one to another. Progress is in the nature of motion in a straight line. Lessons in agriculture have little if any logical order so far as being dependent upon each other, in a causal way. It is on this account that lessons in plant culture may begin with the fruit, the roots, or the stem as is convenient. In case the fruit is taken as a starting-point the succeeding lessons, instead of running in a straight line like a series of causes and effects, or a group of closely related sequences, represent a group of sciences with the first lesson as a center of radiations. These sciences may have fairly welldefined lines separating them from each other, but the lesson on the fruit of a given plant is inseparable from either of them. It is an undivided part of each science. And the series of lessons on the fruit must go from science to science until the circuit is complete. Take an example:

The meagerest sort of a lesson on the apple would include such features as variety, form, color, size, and uses. But its variety is identical with so much of its botany; its form is involved in geometric mathematics; its color is a matter of physics, chemistry, and meteorology, and possibly of geology; its size is due in part to variety, which is botanical, in part to climate, which is meteorology, in part to altitude and latitude, which are geographical, in part to nourishment, which is physiologicobotanical; its uses first as food, second as an article of commerce, third as a source of power in the form of alcohol, identify the study of the apple with the sciences of domestic economy, economics, and political economy. From this it is plain that a lesson on the apple merely as a fruit, instead of being the beginning of a series of lessons following one after another in a dependent order, becomes the center for progress in the form of a spiral rather than of a straight line. The apple is the converging point for seven or eight well-defined sciences. And the study of the apple that confines itself to the most obvious features of it, i.e., variety, form, color, size, and uses, must cross-section each of the seven

or eight sciences. Each science in turn gives its message toward the explanation of the apple.

The apple is serving a double rôle in this illustration-it is both a center for the convergence of a group of sciences and at the same time a center of radiation into a surrounding group of sciences. And the question may now be put, as to whether the apple should be studied as a means of introducing a student to the sciences, or whether the sciences should be studied as a means of understanding the apple.

The field from which similar illustrations might be drawn is as wide as the whole field of agriculture. Examples may be found in animal life, in the garden, the forest, and in the field. Whatever object is taken, whether an apple, a potato, an ear of corn, a hen, a horse, or a forest nut, the same group of sciences must be looked to for principles of explanation and for guides to conduct in dealing with the object. These objects of study are tied up with human interest. This is what makes them agricultural. Science for science's sake is unrelated to human interests. Botany as such never touches man. Zoölogy as such only touches man as an animal, and as a science is unrelated to human interests until it deals with horses and hogs and hens, not because they are animals but because they are man-nurtured animals. Botany allies itself with human interests only when it deals with plants as they are related to human welfare. The human-interest aspect of the physical and biological sciences is what makes certain substances like soil, water, and air, and a few plants and animals, agricultural. To teach these things apart from their human interest makes them simply objects of science and non-agricultural. It would, therefore, appear that from the standpoint of the close relation of the farm arts to the sciences, or from the standpoint of human interest, agriculture should be taught as agriculture and not as an applied science.

VIB. IN THE PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOLS AGRICULTURE
SHOULD BE TAUGHT AS AGRICULTURE,

NOT AS APPLIED SCIENCE

G. F. WARREN

Professor of Farm Management, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.

A very large part of our agricultural instruction may be combined with other sciences and will serve to enrich these studies. I believe that agricultural illustrations will almost revolutionize the teaching of science, which is in danger of becoming too academic. So soon as we get a science well systematized with definite sets of laboratory exercises, which we feel are fixed for all time, we have lost one of the most useful features about science, that is, that it studies the earth and the civilization that surrounds us-conditions that are ever changing.

While teaching capillarity in physics, the soil offers a most valuable illustration. While teaching friction, such questions as the relative draft of riding and walking plows may be cited. A well-constructed riding plow will carry a man and draw easier than will a walking plow, because a third of the draft of the walking plow is due to friction on the bottom of the furrow, whereas with the riding plow, the friction is placed on the axle and the axle is greased. Another illustration might be given of the reason why placing the double-tree below the tongue will enable a team to pull a heavier load than if the double-tree is high, as in the case of carriages. The first thing that gives way when a horse fails to pull a load is the feet. The horse cannot stick to the ground, but if hitched low a part of the load will pull down on the back, making the horse "heavier" and the friction greater, and will enable the horse to pull more. This is also one of the reasons why a draft horse should be heavy.

While teaching bookkeeping in rural high schools, farm accounts rather than operations involving some large city business should be used for at least a part of the illustrative material. Farm accounts are more complicated than are the accounts for city business. They would, therefore, better meet the objection that some people have to bookkeepingthat it does not require sufficient mental application.