the Agricultural College, a spacious airy
laboratory, for elementary study, with a laboratory
for advanced analyses and a professor's room,
have been constructed out of an old barn. It
has been thoroughly fitted up, each student
has plenty of room for his own operations, and
probably there is no place of education in the
kingdom with a laboratory more convenient for
its pupils, or for the professional analyses made
by its chiefs. The work of the day was the
analysis of water for organic matter, lime, and
so forth. The different ways of testing could
be copied into note books from a writing on the
wall; the meaning of them was briefly and
clearly told by the professor, and all requisite
practical directions were at the same time given.
Then the students set to work for themselves
with their evaporating pans, their retorts and
reagents, taking counsel of their teacher wherever
they met with any difficulty.

So, too, the professor of natural history works
at fit time with his students in the open country,
and there is, by-the-by, a curious want of
uniformity in the surface formation of the
country about Cirencester, which makes this
region a very convenient one for the out-door
study of geology. The professor of agriculture
takes his students about the farm. The veterinary
professor has his hospital, and a capital
series of casts showing the teeth of animals at
different ages, preparations of diseased structure,
and other delicacies. The principal, who
is also professor of mathematics and surveying,
goes abroad among his students with chain and
theodolite. When a tree is felled in the park
he teaches them to estimate the value of its
timber. They apply under his direction
mathematics to the measuring of haystacks, and
at the annual valuation of the farm there is a
prize for the valuation by a student which
comes nearest to that made professionally.

Great attention is paid to the study of the
true values of farm work and produce. At once,
upon entering, each student begins farm book-
keeping, and has punctually to post up the
details of the college farm. In the second year
this book-keeping takes a higher form, and
becomes a scientific study. A book is given to
the student showing among other things the size
of every field, the successive crops it has grown,
and a minute analysis of the soil. Blank leaves
following the description of each field, are then
to be filled up with a minute analysis of the
form of work done on it, the number of hands,
horses, time and money spent upon each detail
of its cultivation, and a mathematical reference
of each element in farm work to a fixed standard
of value. There is so much to be learnt
every day, and such strict testing of the amount
learnt by weekly examinations—of which every
student sees the result in a list of marks showing
him how far he has failed or succeeded in
his studies—that a short time at the Farm and
College cannot be spent unprofitably by any one
who thinks of coaxing bread and meat out of
his mother earth.

Now here is the difficulty. Agriculture rightly
studied has become one of the liberal professions.
At a dinner of the Royal Agricultural
Society at Chester, Mr. Gladstone hardly
exaggerated its real dignity when he spoke of it
as an art " which of all others, perhaps, affords
the most varied scope, and the largest sphere
of development to the powers of the human
mind." But it is not yet so taken by many;
perhaps not by many even among the students
of Cirencester. It combines, like medicine,
practice with science, and for its right pursuit
requires a preparation not many degrees less
thorough. A volume called Practice with
Science contains some lectures which have
been given at Cirencester College. One is by
the principal, upon Agricultural Education;
and in this he combats the notion of the Royal
Agricultural Society, that a well-educated
farmer means a man who has learned Latin and
Greek, and the notion of a member of the
Central Farmers' Club, who argued that the
college had placed the standard of qualification for
its diploma too high, and that a two years'
course of study was too long. " All that was
necessary," said this objector, " was a sound
knowledge of the principles of mathematics,
chemistry, geology, botany, and veterinary
surgery!" As if it did not cost a good part of a
life to get a " sound knowledge" of any one of
those little amusements. Still the notion that
one may gather the fruits of study without
climbing the tree is very common; and although
the number of the Cirencester students who
go steadily through the prescribed course and
fairly earn the college diploma is increasing, it
bears no proportion to the numbers that have
come and gone every year, and to the pains
taken to secure system and thoroughness in the
machinery of education. The cost of this
education is not more than has been found requisite
to meet its unavoidable expenses. A farm cannot
safely be undertaken with less capital than
about eight pounds an acre, and a well cultivated
brain is, as we said at starting, the best
part of a farmer's estate, besides being (in this
country) all of it freehold; yet the cost of
acquiring it bears only a small proportion to the
other costs of a safe start in English farming
life. The English farmer cannot rise to the full
height of the position made for him by the
growth of science, until he receives a sound
school training, valid in every part, and follows
it up with a thorough training for his business.
He should read and speak, not Greek and Latin,
but two living languages besides his own, that
he may be able to converse freely with farmers
from abroad, and profit by their treatises and
journals. But of the time taken from Latin
and Greek the greater part should be spent in
a particular cultivation of arithmetic and
mathematics, and of the first principles of natural
science. Then let him, at the age of sixteen,
pass from school to the farm, and for the next
year see and share in the work done upon it.
So prepared let him go to the Cirencester
College and work firmly through the two years'
course. If he spend his time well he will