598 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



that the principal cause leading to the establishment of such stations 

 was the great and steadily increasing extent to which commercial fer- 

 tilizers are used in American agriculture, and to the absolute necessity 

 which was felt for some means of protecting consumers against fraud 

 in these articles, which are of such a nature that even the grossest 

 frauds can in most cases be detected only by chemical analysis. Con- 

 sequently, most of these stations were and are, first and foremost, fer- 

 tilizer control stations. They put at the service of every consumer of 

 fertilizers in their respective States the skill of professional chemists 

 by whose aid he may test the genuineness and value of the goods he 

 proposes to purchase. A method has also been worked out (the prin- 

 ciple being adopted from the German stations) by which the money- 

 value of a fertilizer may be calculated approximately from the results 

 of analysis and the market pi-ices of a few standard materials. Most 

 or all of the stations follow the custom of frequently publishing 

 analyses and valuations of the fertilizers brought to their notice, or in 

 some cases of all brands sold in the State, and the publicity thus in- 

 sured proves an efficient and sufficient check to fraudulent practices. 

 Of late, a growing interest has manifested itself in the chemical ex- 

 amination of cattle-foods and their rational use, and numerous analy- 

 ses of fodders have been made, accompanied in a few cases by prac- 

 tical feeding-trials. Other work has also been done to a less extent, 

 but it is safe to say that, after deducting the fertilizer and fodder 

 analyses from the work of our stations, the residue would be compara- 

 tively inconsiderable. 



It was quite natural that the activity of the stations should at first 

 take this direction. The fertilizer question was an important one, 

 involving large money interests, and, moreover, it offered a field in 

 which quick and tangible returns were yielded for the money invested 

 in a station. The most short-sighted could not fail to see that the sup- 

 pression of fraud in articles whose aggregate sales amounted to hun- 

 dreds of thousands of dollars in single States annually was well worth 

 the expenditure of a few thousand dollars for an experiment station. 

 But the fertilizer question brought others in its train. Indeed, no 

 small part of the benefit which our agriculture has derived from the 

 introduction of commercial fertilizers has been entirely aside from the 

 pecuniary advantage attending their use. They have aided in intro- 

 ducing definite ideas of what constitutes a fertilizer, and why. The 

 habitual use of chemical analyses of fertilizers is rendering nitrogen, 

 potash, and phosphoric acid almost as familiar terms as air, soil, and 

 water, and thus is contributing in no small degree to the education of 

 farmers. A knowledge of what fertilizers are has led to a demand 

 for information as to how they act, and the most suitable method of 

 using them, and the successes of science in this field have led to the in- 

 quiry whether the feeding of animals may not derive as much benefit 

 from it as the feeding of plants. It would be difficult to-day to find an 



