Are there not some friends of the work among the Freedmen who can appreciate the need of a teacher for a complete scientific outfit?

The race has been kept during slavery from all knowledge of science. Their trades and occupations being of the roughest, and having ignorant parentage, nothing has been learned from the business of life, nor in answer to the questioning of childhood and youth. There is no race now admitted to the privileges of liberal education so barren of scientific ideas and so lacking in scientific spirit. Those who know this people solely from their fine literary and oratorical abilities have no conception of their great deficiency in science. It does not need to be said that, until this is remedied, they cannot be expected to hold their own in a scientific age, and in competition with a scientific race.

Though our course of study is brought down to the very minimum of college work, and the instruction is of a most elementary character, still there are eight sciences to be taught. But this teaching, to be successful, requires the use of illustrative material. With the general introduction of illustrations in our modern schools began the rapid progress in science that distinguishes our age. All true teachers of science affirm with one voice that this aid is indispensable even with the most favored races.

In botany, zoology, mineralogy and geology we need specimens—the great type examples on which classification is founded. In physiology and anatomy we need, in default of material, cheap models. In natural philosophy, chemistry and astronomy we need apparatus—not the costly instruments of precision, but plain, cheap pieces, that are fitted to illustrate and in some cases demonstrate the many and various principles that are taught.

In the pressure of the growing work upon the society, beyond a small sum for incidental expenses, most of the money appropriated for schools goes for the payment of salaries. Our land and our buildings have come from other sources. But our outfit of school requisites has been for the most part overlooked. Some fine instruments have been presented to us, much more costly than we would have selected for ourselves; but their value would be increased many fold by accessory and supplementary apparatus. Are there not those who can, by special gifts, make up this lack also? Must we, of all other teachers of science, be left to make bricks without straw? What answer should be made to those who depreciate the negro's mental capacity? Is it not a pitiful waste of the opportunity, that a factory building should be put up, workmen hired, materials supplied, but no machinery put in? Yet this has been going on with class after class for ten years.

Three-fourths of our graduates follow teaching as a profession, and are more or less teachers of science. They should not only learn that which apparatus alone can teach, but also how to use it themselves. Should a master workman be expected to teach the theory and practice of a trade through the use of pictures of tools and machines?

We have not neglected our opportunities in respect to making collections of specimens about us, and constructing cheap forms of apparatus. We have learned new trades and toiled early and late and often through whole vacations. But, without workshop appliances, part of that accomplished is unsatisfactory, and the major and more difficult part remains untouched. But where one has a great pressure of outside duties incidental to such a work as this, how utterly inadequate such driblets of time as can be spared are for such a task can easily be imagined.

Is there any lover of science and friend of the freedmen who can understand our condition and give us ten thousand dollars for an outfit, and if possible an additional sum as an endowment for annual expenses?