AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATIONS. 603 



It is this characteristic, and this alone, which gives them their greater 

 value, and justifies the expenditure of the public funds to make them. 

 Farmers have been experimenting since Adam was expelled from Eden, 

 yet scarcely a meeting of farmers occurs where the most diverse opin- 

 ions are not maintained on the most familiar subjects. Our experi- 

 ment stations should improve on this state of things. It is a com- 

 paratively simple matter to make experiments as simple as playing 

 Hamlet's pipe but to so experiment as to obtain results that will 

 stand is quite another matter. Experimenting is an art, and requires 

 an apprenticeship no less than music. Now, all real scientific training 

 cramming we do not consider is a training in the art of experi- 

 menting, and hence the statement, that the first qualification for the 

 director of an experiment station is scientific training, is equivalent 

 to saying that he must have learned his trade. 



In the second place, the director of an experiment station must 

 know what experiments to make as well as how to make them. He 

 must be familiar with the needs of agriculture on the one hand, in 

 order not to waste time in making needless experiments ; and he must 

 know what other experimenters have done, that he may not needlessly 

 repeat their work. 



To sum up briefly, the director of an agricultural experiment 

 station should be a trained scientist, who has made a special study of 

 agricultural science, and who is reasonably familiar with agricultural 

 practice. We have named these requirements in what we believe to 

 be the order of their imjDortance. A certain measure of all of them 

 is indispensable, but deficiencies in the latter two may be more or less 

 readily made up, while lack of the fii'st is, in our view of the matter, 

 fatal. 



Many other points regarding the organization and management of 

 experiment stations suggest themselves for consideration, but it is the 

 purpose of this article simply to point out the general principles which 

 should prevail in the founding of these stations, their organization, 

 and the determination of their lines of work. In the decision of these 

 questions public opinion is the most powerful factor, and if this 

 paper shall contribute in any degree to the formation of liberal and 

 enlightened views on a subject of growing importance, or even suc- 

 ceed in awakening more general interest in it, and directing inquiry 

 toward it, its object will have been accomplished. 



