examined, and if it carries on its face anything that arouses suspicion, it is at once cast aside; so that an attempt is made to keep well within the mark, and allow no returns to go in from anyone who wilfully tries to mislead us. After that, we figure out the total area in the various crops, the value of the entire farm, and the number and value of the live stock. Then we must estimate for the year the amount of the various crops produced. In the month of July we send out our returns, and ask for an estimate before the crops are harvested, and later, in October, when threshing has begun, we send out our cards once more to get returns from the actual threshing result. By compiling these we gradually are able to put together and publish for general information the figures which we put forth in the form of our annual report. But you might read page after page of that report, and conclude that there was very little to interest or benefit you in it. Let me refer, however, to a few things which will indicate the progress or change in conditions that has taken place within the last ten years in the Province. First, take wheat: We find that the farmers in Ontario to-day are able to produce just as large crops of wheat as they were ten, twelve or fifteen years ago. We find at the same time that the area given to wheat has been gradually decreasing; that we have been passing out of the condition when wheat was king. It makes but little difference to-day to the farmers of Ontario what the condition of wheat is, or what the market price is, in comparison with the other crops that are being grown. When you turn to barley and oats, you will find that there has been a gradual increase in the acreage and the total yield; and so with a number of other crops. Turning to live stock. let me give you a few figures to show you something that will be of importance in connection with the great live stock industry in the Province. The value of horses on the farms is about $55,000,000, and the anual sales amount to $5,000,000. These figures in themselves count for very little; they count for a great deal if beside them you are able to place figures referring to any other industry. In cattle, the total value on the farm has grown step by step until it has reached $65,000,000, and the annual sales $25,000,000. Sheep have remained stationary for a few years, although for a number of years before that there was a decline. Their value at present is $8,000,000, with annual sales amounting to about $3,000,000. In swine the value has grown in a few years from $6,000,000 to $12,000,000, and the annual output has increased from $10,000,000 to $20,000,000. Poultry have also increased. Adding these together, we find that the total value of the live stock on the farms of Ontario to-day amounts to somewhere between $140,000,000 and $150,000,000. You will see now, perhaps, why it is that the exhibition that is being held in the city of Guelph attracts the attention of the growers of live stock throughout the Province, and also of the financiers and the men who are supposed to have their hand on the pulse of this country, and are as much interested in its welfare as the farmers themselves. I could speak of the butter and cheese industry, but let me give you a few figures, summing up the whole thing as far as the total value of farm property is concerned. In 1893, farm property in Ontario was valued at $970,000,000. The next year at $954,000,000, the next year at $931,000,000, the next year at $910,000,000, and in 1897 at $905,000,000, showing that year by year there was a steady decrease in the value of the farms of the Province, which in the period mentioned amounted to no less than $65,000,000. In 1897 the upward movement began, and for the succeeding years the figures read as follows:-1897, $923,000,000; 1898, $947,000,000; 1899, $974,000,000; 1900, $1,001,000,000; 1901, $1,044,000,000.

For the last six years our books show that the agricultural interests of this country have been increasing in value by millions upon millions. The total agricultural assets are going ahead. If you look around and ask why-what has taken place-you will find the secret is that we have been developing our live stock interests and our cheese inter

5 EX U.

ests; and while these have been advancing, the other departments of our agricultural work have not been falling behind. While we have been increasing the output of live stock and cheese, our great crop-producing capabilities have been going ahead at the same time. The productiveness of the soil of the country has been increasing. Wheat has gone back step by step, and other things have taken its place, such as barley and oats, which help out the great live stock industry. The condition to-day is better than it has been for twenty or twenty-five years. If you go to the conferences held in connection with our live stock and dairy industries, or our fruit-growing industries, you will find a keenness of interest amongst those in attendance, and a general air of prosperity about them such as we did not know a few years ago. If you ask why this is the case, my answer to a large extent would be this, that the patient work done year in and year out by our agricultural organizations and institutions, which was not recognized for many long years, began gradually to make itself felt on the agricultural mind of this country; and I think I would put first among the influences that have contributed to this the work of the Agricultural College, which has been so well carried on by the staff, under the capable direction of the man who sits here as chairman to-night, Dr. James Mills.

FARM MANAGEMENT.

By Prof. W. J. Spillman, Agrostologist, U. S. Department of Agriculture.

I think I may truthfully say that this Union is the most successful affair of its kind on the American continent. We, across the line, have always wondered how the thing was done; how it was possible to get so large a body of farmers to conduct the careful experiments which the members of this Union are called upon to conduct. We have had much difficulty in doing similar work, and I must confess that I do not yet fully understand how it is done. When I attempt to get the United States farmer to put in experimental plots, he says, "I do not want to fool with these little plots; if you want me to experiment, let me sow ten acres"; but that is not an experiment. โก order to make an experimental test, it is absolutely necessary to have the area small enough to insure uniformity of the soil. We are trying across the line to copy from you, and build up a Union such as you have. In those States that have good Colleges; like you have at Guelph, we are succeeding. Where we have a few men who graduate from those Colleges, and then go back on the farm, we can get these men to carry on experiments, and a few of their neighbors also; so that in Ohio, Michigan, New York, and in some other States, we are developing a system of investigation upon the farm very similar to that which has been so successful in Ontario. Not only is your Union known across the line, but your College is very well known, and a great many of the Colleges over there have on their staff graduates of Guelph, and many of these graduates have made distinguished names for themselves among the agriculturists of the United States.

When I was a boy on the farm I conceived the idea of going away to school. On the farm where I was brought up, it was the custom to start to the field at seven o'clock in the morning. We quit very promptly at noon and rested an hour, and then worked till 6 o'clock in the evening. We lived considerably farther south, and the winter days were not as short nor the summer days as long as they are here. We made a living, however, even if we did not work more than nine hours a day. When I decided to go to College I was raking and scraping together enough to pay my expenses. and I decided that after we had finished our fall plowing I would hire out to a neighbor and earn a little more money. I went to one of our neighbors and engaged with him to do some plowing. The farm on which this neighbor lived was one of the best in the

first book he got hold of was Young's little book on "The Soil and Cattle." He got an idea from that book, which was that, on a thirteen-acre farm, where land is worth $1,500 an acre, he could not afford to grow pasture, so he put his cows in the barn and commenced growing feed, and cutting that feed and carrying it to the cows. He lost four hundred dollars as the result of his first year's operations. During the next six years he paid off a mortgage of $7,200 which was on the property, and the next year he spent in Europe. He is to-day a director in three large corporations, and one of the best known men in the United States. He has a continual stream of visitors flocking to see that little farm, so much so that he is thinking of charging admission to protect himself. He now keeps thirty head of stock on that farm, and last year sold thirtythree hundred pounds of hay. He does not raise grain, but raises hay, silage and soiling crops, and buys gluten meal, linseed oil meal, and bran. He also raises a little corn, but buys no commercial fertilizers. If you will calculate how much dry matter it will take to supply thirty head of stock, you will get an idea of what the farm produces, and it was the best-kept herd I ever saw in my life. If you make the calculation, you will find that it will take seven tons of hay to every acre of land on that farm every year. He keeps no record, so that I could not find out what his yields were, but he told me how much milk he sold, and he has cleared $2,000 a year selling milk and young cattle. He gets $100 each for his calves, and is one of the most intelligent breeders in the United States. He does very little work himself, but one thing about the place is absolutely remarkable, and that is the system and orderliness. He said, "I can leave home at any time, without notice to my hired hands, and be gone a week, as I frequently am on Farmers' Institute work, and when I come back home, just as soon as I see 'either one of my hired men I know what time of day it is, because I know what they are both doing every hour of the day." He had twelve fields on that thirteen-acre farm, but he sat there and told me the crops that had been grown on every one of them for three years past; he knew the farm like a book. There is an example of system in management. I have written up all I could learn about that farm. Before I left home I handed it over for publication, and it will be published in the year book of the Department of Agriculture during the winter. I contend that it is worth a great deal to the average farmer to have a description of the work of the most successful farmers; and that is the work we are doing in encouraging the study of system in farm management.

SOME OF THE ASPECTS OF NATURE STUDY.

By Dr. W. H. Muldrew, Dean, Macdonald Institute, Guelph.

I must thank the preceding speakers, one and all, for their assistance to me in introducing this important topic. The addressses of the day have urged over and over again, and from many points of view, the necessity for an education in harmony with the lives of the people. This principle forms the basis for Nature Study in its relation to agriculture, and it remains for me merely to sum up these excellent arguments in a few closing words.

School systems are receiving much criticism just now, and ours, in spite of many excellent features, is not excepted. We are told, for instance, that the public schools are out of touch with the people, that the higher schools widen the breach, and that the universities turn out impractical men. If such charges are true, even in part, it is time for us to examine the causes of such conditions and to seek a remedy.

We are all well acquainted with the theory of a pyramid based on our public. schools and promising a liberal education to every one who will but climb. If such a "liberal" education is fitted to make men truly free by giving them the mastery over the conditions in which they live. then surely this is a high and worthy ideal. But

this word "liberal" has not always stood for breadth and depth in education, and even now it suggests too often rather that narrow conception of liberty which we have inherited from the ancient world. Greece and Rome have given to us many good gifts, but their distinction between the free man educated for a life of ease and the slave destined to hopeless toil should have no place in the civilization of the twentieth century. The liberal education of the future will make men free indeed, because it will provide knowledge and power in active relation to the conditions under which they must live. A few years ago the President of our Provincial University, standing at the apex of our educational system, in the course of a public address, deplored the fact that our students could not secure a liberal education in this Province before the age of twenty-one or twenty-two years, because they were not taught Latin, French, German, and perhaps Greek in our public schools. He was looking to Germany for a better system, and found that there, these subjects were begun at ten years of age. We must take issue with the learned President as to this conception of a liberal education, and we shall find very strong support for our position in the words of the German Emperor, spoken not long after the time to which I refer. Kaiser Wilhelm must have a fair acquaintance with the conditions in Germany, and certainly combines with some eccentricities a great deal of good judgment, but he declared most emphatically that he was dissatisfied with the results of such education. "We do not want," said he, "to make our boys into young Greeks or young Romans; we want young Germans, who are in touch with the real life of their own country." And the education that is making Germany is not obtained in these "liberal" schools, but in the "real" schools which are supported there as perhaps nowhere else in the modern world.

People are asking, more and more, if education is to be a preparation for life, why must the schools be kept apart from the life for which they prepare? They ask, is it necessary to go back thousands of years in time and away thousands of miles in space to find materials for cultivating the minds of our children? Education is not the only thing that has suffered from the same error. There have been systems of religion out of all relation with human life. Such can never stand. The only religion that can bear the test of ages will build up men's characters by actual contact with actual life and experience, and so it must be in education.

Nature Study, Manual Training, Industrial Training, and Domestic Science as subjects of school study are but branches of one fundamental principle or method which would aim, by basing education on the commonplace experiences of actual conditions, to prepare for living here and now. Having thus learned to live, it will be the place of literature and abstract learning to teach men to live better.

The boy who conducts a careful experiment in the growth of crops and follows out the causes of its success or failure gains as much mental training as if he had written a poem in Latin, but, in addition, he comes into contact in a most vital way with facts and principles that will be of use to him as long as he lives. These branches are often spoken of as if they were new. They are nothing of the kind. They form the essentials of the oldest things we have in education. Wherever a mother with sympathy and kindness has encouraged the questioning spirit of her child in the midst of this strange world; wherever an intelligent father has helped a little one groping in the dark to a better understanding of the things around him, there you have Nature Study, in a form that may be imitated, but can never be surpassed, in the work of a school. The part of the schools must be to make such training a little wider and a little more definite, and thus to lead onward to a knowledge of nature, a sympathy with nature, and a power in the guidance of nature into harmony with human life. But before this can be done in our schools I am satisfied that our teachers must be trained and guided and interested. There is a theory that every teacher is qualified to teach along

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country, and the man who preceded him had made a fortune off it and retired. Brush, who had rented the farm, had expended considerable money, and had bought six good horses, five good cows, and farm machinery. I went down at 6.30 in the morning to start work, and when I arrived there were a number of furrows plowed around' the field. When he came around, he said: "You are a little late"; and I asked him when they began, and he replied, "At four o'clock in the morning." I said, "Do you expect to make a profit on this farm?" He said, "If hard work will do it, plowing about two and a half inches deep. What were the results? Two years later Mr. Brush had two old, worn-out horses, his cows had all been sold, or had starved to death, and finally he moved into Indian Territory, where a man could brand cattle enough to keep the wolf from the door. He is now in a poorhouse in the North, and his wife and the rest of the family are dead. This is the best illustration I have of the man who believes that farming consists of hard work. He was going to make a living on that farm if hard work would do it. I want to tell you that hard work alone will not make a living for a man anywhere. I want to say further that one pound of brain on the farm is worth a ton of muscle.

I was very much interested in the talks which preceded me this evening. One of them suggested to me a farm home with which I have the honor to be well acquainted. It was at one time my duty to judge the butter at a State Fair in Washington, and in awarding the prizes I was required to give my reasons for giving them. I did not know whose butter it was that had won first prize, but it was one of the finest samples that had ever come to the association. In my talk I told them this, and said that I could tell some things about the man who made that butter, although I did not know who he was. He happened to be sitting on a seat right in front of me, and it was the first time he had attended one of our meetings. When I got through, he rose up and asked some questions. I saw immediately that I had a man of brains to deal with, and I answered him as intelligently as I could. I saw that he knew something. I had spoken particularly about the excellent flavor of the butter, and made the remark that the man who fed the cows understood the science of feeding to get butter of that flavor in the late winter. He said that his principal feed at the time was turnips, and that they were old and strong. Then I knew that I was dealing with an exceedingly intelligent man. I said, "I can tell you just how you feed turnips," and I told him. "Yes," he said, "that is exactly the way I do it." I said, "Where did you learn?" He said, "From experience, and I read it in the papers." I afterwards cultivated his acquaintance. He had been educated for a lawyer, but had given it up because he had been very successful in some commercial ventures, and had cash in the bank and partly owned a mercantile establishment. He became so prosperous that he thought he had enough money ahead to develop a supposed iron mine, and lost everything he had in it. He went into the woods, and took up eighty acres of land, and cleared off a little place large enough to build a house and barn, and when he got them built he was three thousand dollars in debt. He was a man of integrity, well known in the community, and could get credit. In nine years he had paid that debt, had built a nice, modern dwelling, had built a large, commodious barn, and had cleared off 40 acres of the land. Twenty acres was natural prairie, and was kept in pasture, but some 45 acres he had put under the plow. During that time he never hired a day's labor, but he, with his three boys and three girls (the oldest boy being sixteen at the time he went on the farm) has done the work of the place and built the houses. They never went to work before seven o'clock, and no one ever did any work after six o'clock, but the evening was reserved for reading and amusement. The oldest boy in that family came to school with me later, and graduated in agriculture, and was offered a valuable position in Washington, but refused it to go back to the farm, because he had not been educated away from the farm, and farm life to him had