The annual expenditures of the College of Agriculture and Experiment Station are now about the same as were the expenditures of the whole University at the time of my coming, in 1880. Nearly half our income is from the United States Government. Our Experiment Station publishes annually a report of 350 pages, and it issues frequent bulletins. The expense of publishing these is met by the generosity of the state. We distribute annually from the Experiment Station about eight million pages of printed matter gratuitously to the farmers of the state. In addition to this sixty thousand copies of the Farmers' Institute Bulletin, covering 320 pages, are given out at the various farmers' meetings held in the state.

When I came to Madison twenty-two years ago, the Agricultural Department received about one letter per week on the average. Now our correspondence amounts to thousands of letters annually, farmers writing to us on every conceivable topic. The department, grown into a college and experiment station, has become a bureau of information. Not only do we get letters from farmers, but from business men of all classes who are interested in some line of agriculture. While the college has grown greatly since my coming, I predict that its progress thus far is but an earnest of what is to come. Agriculture must remain the greatest single vocation in our state, and the prosperity of this commonwealth rests primarily upon the prosperity and success of its farming peoples. These can succeed only when they are intelligent, thrifty and pursuing the right lines of agricultural industry. To bring these conditions there must be a strong central institution like our Agricultural College and Experiment Station, working steadily for the elevation and advancement of the people it represents. It must remain a bureau of education and information, and as the farmers come to know it better and to learn of its possible use to them, they will see that it is liberally supported and accomplishes for them what it should.