264 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



order to get good beef, wool, and milk cheaply. Aware that 

 accurate and full knowledge of these matters could only be 

 obtained by accurate and numerous experiments, they deter- 

 mined to have the experiments. Feeling that on their own 

 farms the work of experimenting was costly, interfered with 

 the. regular business of the place, could not be properly car- 

 ried on for want of skilled hands, and could not be suitably 

 laid out for want of skilled heads, they united together to 

 bring all these requisites into one focus, so that instead of 

 having to be content with the gratuitous and accidental drip- 

 pings from the science of the universities and schools, they 

 might have their own well-spring of information, under their 

 own control, and for their own purposes, purely. 



They recognized the fact that science had developed the 

 use of many valuable instruments of discovery — the ther- 

 mometer, the microscope, the balance — that chemical analysis 

 and the art of chemical investigation, which had given to the 

 world phosphorus, superphosphates, chloroform, petroleum 

 photography, electroplating, and were to give chloral, the 

 superb dyes of coal tar, and an endless list of benefactions, 

 were veritable engines of progress — and they determined to 

 make full avail of them. They saw, too, that the farm was 

 the place where these might most effectually be put to doing 

 farm w^ork, and therefore, in the year 1852, a company of 

 Saxon farmers, constituting the Leipzig Agricultural Society, 

 opened the first Farmer's Station for Agricnitur'al Experi- 

 ment, at the little village of Moeckern, near the city of 

 Leipzig. The society already owned there a small farm, 

 with farm house, barns, and some improved stock and imple- 

 ments. They engaged Dr. Emil AVolff, a young scientist of 

 promise, to take charge, and Mr. Baehr, the manager of the 

 farm, was instructed to superintend all the practical detail of 

 experiments. Two or three rooms were fitted up as a chemi- 

 cal laboratory, a small glass house was built for vegetation 

 experiments, an assistant chemist was secured, and the Ex- 

 periment Station was an accomplished fact. 



This was not, indeed, the first association of farmers for 



