VERMONT DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 107 



Mr. Hoard. — I think it was scientific nonsense. 



Mr. Whitaker. — What will you think of it when I tell you that the 

 man who made that statement was Professor Atkinson? 



That incident seems to me an illustration of the advance dairying 

 has made during the last thirty years. At that time the greatest scien- 

 tific men taught that idea which the common farmer knows to-day was 

 simply nonsense. See how we have advanced! It is due to the different 

 State dairy departments. In our form of government, with a national 

 or federal government there is room for a national dairy division, and 

 it can do certain things that the State alone cannot do by reason of 

 their limitations. In the first place it can act as a sort of clearing 

 house of information, circulating the knowledge and information that is 

 the result of the experiments from the different States, and by the 

 issuing of bulletins can tell us in New England of any practical work 

 done by the Experiment Station in Wisconsin. 



If Dr. Hills gets hold of some new truth it can be disseminated 

 through Wisconsin and the other western States in the same way. 



There are some things the national government can do which the 

 State cannot. There are a great many problems that are not State 

 issues, but are national in their character. In the past year the 

 National Dairy Department has made six-month tests of the work of a 

 number of different creameries; there were 500 of them in number, cov- 

 ering nineteen States. It has tested some 730 samples of butter from 

 eighteen different States and published the result of this census in a 

 bulletin. Work of an interstate nature has been done and can be done 

 in an effective way in studying the sale of milk in all the great business 

 centers, and the department is now about to undertake some work in 

 connection with condensed milk, where there is a fruitful field for in- 

 vestigation. 



Professor Decker alluded to something the dairy division has done in 

 the study of the effect of cold storage on the curing of cheese, which is 

 something which will be of national importance when the facts are 

 fully worked out. 



The National Dairy Division has done excellent work in connection 

 with the Army and Navy Departments in inspecting butter for the use 

 of the army and navy, thereby furnishing the soldiers and sailors of the 

 nation a better quality of butter. We feel the National Dairy Division 

 has thus been of service to the American dairyman in extending the 

 market for a first class product and seeing that the first class product 

 is secured for the soldiers and sailors. 



The national department has done a great deal that no State can do 

 in the matter of investigating foreign markets to ascertain the dairy 

 conditions and in disseminating the information through this country for 

 the knowledge of our American dairymen. So that you see, in addition 

 to the wonderfully good work being done all over the country in the 

 different States by the State departments, we have, as a climax, so to 

 speak, the national department doing a great deal of educational work, 



