CONDITIONS OF SUCCESSFUL EXPERIMENTING. 315 



agree with the results reported. Of course, you became dissatis- 

 fied, and said something was wrong; the fault was either in your 

 experiment or in the experiment of the wi'iter of the article. If 

 in him, you did not want to follow out any more of his experi- 

 ments ; if in you, you wanted to know what the fault is. 



Now, what are the conditions of a successful experiment ? what 

 are the conditions that will prevent these discordant results ? You 

 do not find chemists, you do not find natural philosophei's disagree- 

 ing in their experiments ; why is it that the results of agricultural 

 experiments are almost always discordant ? There is a fault somo 

 where. Let us see where it is. I have said that an experiment is 

 a question put to nature, and a successful experiment one which 

 cli<5its an answer Yes or No. Now, the conditions of a successful 

 experiment will obviously be those which will secure that answer, 

 and they will be precisely those which will obtain an answer, yes 

 or no, anywhere. I have no doubt that either of the Professors of 

 the Agricultural College would say that he might ask the best 

 scholar in either of the classes a question, and he would find that 

 the answer would depend upon the way in which he put the ques- 

 tion. If you should put a confusing question to the most brilliant 

 scholar, you would get a confused reply ; but put the question in 

 a clear, intelligible manner, and you will get a plain, clear answer, 

 yes or no. All lawyers know that it is a very difficult thing to 

 acquire the art of putting clear questions. Some acquire this art, 

 some seem to have it naturally. You as farmers must learn to put 

 a question to nature so that you can got an unequivocal answer. 

 You know, that in order to get a plain, unequivocal answer, you 

 must make your question in the first place, plain, and in the next 

 place you must make it pointed. It is so with experiments. You 

 must make your experiment plain, and you must make that experi- 

 ment point to some one definite end ; then there will be no trouble 

 at all. First make the question plain, have a clear idea of what 

 you want answered in your mind, and then you will have a plain, 

 intelligible answer. 



Suppose I should propose this as an experiment to the Board of 

 Agriculture : "What is the effect of phosphate of lime upon the corn 

 crop ?" One member might try bone dust, and obtain certain re- 

 sults ; another would try superphosphate of lime, and obtain certain 

 results ; another might try apatite, mineral phosphate of lime, and 

 he would obtain different results. The results would not agree, 

 and yet you would say that in each case phosphate of lime was 



