the business of fanning the first schools for the scientific teaching of agriculture. It was the West, and not the older and wealthier East, that gave the United States its first agricultural school. The second constitution of Michigan, then close to the western frontier, provided in 1850 for the founding of an institution to teach agriculture, and the movement, spreading eastward, resulted in the incorporation of what is now Pennsylvania’s State College of Agriculture in 1854, and the incorporation of Maryland’s agricultural college and the founding of a school of agriculture in Massachusetts, both in 1856. The work thus started reached Congress, and resulted, in 1857, in the introduction of a “land-grant” aid bill, proposed by Hon. Justin S. Morrill, and passed in 1862. The Department of Agriculture was created, first as a bureau, in the same year.
Up to 1905, the progress of agricultural education under this encouragement was such that 66 institutions had been organized, with an endowment fund amounting to $12,045,629.
