The former able Director-General of French Agriculture, Monsieur Tisserand, says: "The aim and object of France has been not only to give to children and young people the means of acquiring knowledge, but also to establish means for _interesting old cultivators_. In this century of extreme competition we must admit that the agriculturist can only thrive if, in working the soil, he adopts scientific methods. Old routine is no longer sufficient in this branch, as it is proved to be insufficient in manufacture." In carrying out her enlightened policy, instruction was given in 1893[21] to 3,600 pupil teachers. Thirty agricultural laboratories throughout the country furnish analyses of soils and manures for the help of cultivators, and 3,362 trial fields are established where farmers can profit by experiments suitable to their own districts. The special farm schools number sixteen; practical schools of agriculture, thirty-nine; national schools of agriculture and horticulture, six; three veterinary schools; and one each, bearing the name of National Agronomic Institute, is a shepherd school, a cheese, and a silkworm school. In the universities are no less than 160 departments and chairs of agriculture for students of profoundest research. All this costs the departments alone over 4,504,050 francs per annum. [Footnote 21: Statistics of 1893. The French Government only occasionally issues its official report of agricultural schools.] In Prussian Germany no less activity is displayed or energy put forth to make the farmer's occupation one of financial profit and scientific status. Statistics for 1897 are at hand in the report of the Prussian Minister of Agriculture. The German system is based on the theory that schools and colleges are the only places where theoretical agriculture can be properly taught. Few of the higher agricultural schools first established were exclusively such. A liberal education could be obtained at most of them without touching the subject of agriculture. Later educators have developed a system which begins by fostering a love for Nature in the minds of the pupils in the kindergarten, and patiently develops that love through all the dozen or more grades of schools until it culminates in the polytechnic school or the degree granted by the university. Germany is indebted to the learned Professor Thaer for the establishment of its first agricultural school at Möglin in 1807. But more than all is she, in common with all the world, indebted to the famous chemist Baron von Liebig, who, in 1840, announced the scientific truth which underlies all arguments for agricultural education--viz., that no matter how impoverished a soil is naturally, or has become by excessive cropping, its fertility may be restored, maintained, and even increased by providing it with the mineral and organic matter which it lacks.