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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 1, 1897)
16 THE BATTALION. may be made profitable when applied on a proper scale by the farmer. Those manured beds, those rows of grafted trees and vines and vegetables, the treatment of that registered stock, that application of machinery, that opening up of irrigating sluices here, and cutting off water supply there, that watching and reporting of results everywhere—all this is experiment, only experiment as yet. Many a tree is ruined forever in the process, here and there some detail is, with all the forethought of the operator, neglected, nullifying the experiment; mistakes are made just as fruitful in results as success wmuld have been, because they are looking, as I said, not for a return in dollars and cents, in marketable bushels and tons, but in principles, in knowledge of agricultural possibilities. Now, I have known parents to bring or send their boys to our college and leave them with this understanding, or language: “Well, 1 want you to see what you can make of my boy.” The idea seems to be, and many a young man entertains it whose parents have never ut-* tered it, that a college is a sort of experimental garden, bed or hot house, in which we are planted for a while, with more or less of the home soil clinging to our rootlets, to undergo a series of experiments with a view to learning, what can be made of us. Fertilizing agencies will be applied to us ; w r e will be artificially treated all round; we will be stuffed with mental nutriment for all we are worth; we will be plowed and harrowed and dragged, and our monthly grades will be registered against us or in our favor as a proof of how the experiment is succeeding; we will be tied and propped and straightened up like nursery trees, trimmed and scraped and sprayed; we will be budded on to some old fogy in barracks, after whom they expect us to pat tern; in a word, we are here under trial to see w r hat can be made of us. How many of you are laboring under this misapprehen sion of student life I do not know; some of you are. I do know that many a bright mind and immortal soul has been degraded in its api>rehension of all that is noble and righteous from mak ing this initiatory blunder in life. I can honestly thank God for a latter day theory of development which has turned us away from and almost killed that old doctrine of probation, whose iron chains were forged anywhere you please, save in this revelation of God’s good will to men. College life, young- men, is a soil, rich, exuberantly rich, in all the elements which