Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, April 1899: Volume LIV, No. 6, April 1899Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, April 1899: Volume LIV, No. 6, April 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
any other man either before or since he completed his work as State
Geologist."
As professor of zoölogy and animal physiology, Dr. Miles is described
by one of his students, who afterward became a professor in the
college and then its president, as having been thoroughly interested
in the subjects he taught, and shown that interest in his work and in
his treatment of his students. He labored as faithfully and
industriously with the class of five to which President Clute belonged
as if it "had numbered as many score." He supplemented the meager
equipment of his department from his more extensive private apparatus
and collections, which were freely used for class work; and, when
there was need, he had the skill to prepare new pieces of apparatus.
"He was on the alert for every chance for illustration which occasion
offered: an animal slaughtered for the tables gave him an opportunity
to lecture on its viscera; a walk over the drift-covered fields found
many specimens of rock which he taught us to distinguish; the mud and
the sand banks along the river showed how in the periods of the dim
past were formed fossil footprints and ripples; the woods and swamps
and lakes gave many useful living specimens, some of which became the
material for the improvised dissecting room; the crayon in his hand
produced on board or paper the chart of geologic ages, the table of
classification, or the drawing of the part of an animal under
discussion."
Prof. R. C. Kedzie came to the college a little later, in 1863, when
Dr. Miles had been for two years a professor, and found him then the
authority "for professors and students alike on beasts, birds, and
reptiles, on the stones of the field, and insects of the air,"
thorough, scholarly, and enthusiastic, and therefore very popular with
his classes.
The projection of agricultural colleges under the Agricultural College
Land Grant Act of 1862 stimulated a demand for teachers of scientific
agriculture, and it was found that they were rare. Of old school
students of science there was no lack--able men, as President Clute
well says, who were familiar with their little laboratories and with
the old theories and methods, but who did not possess the new vision
of evolution and the conservation of energy, men of the study rather
than the field, and least of all men of the orchard and stock farm;
and they knew nothing of the practical application of chemistry to
fertilization and the raising of crops and the composition of feed
stuffs, of physiology to stock-breeding, and of geology and physics to
the study of the soils.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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