318 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



him to do it, and if lie attempted it lie would be really trifling with 

 those who employ him. Everything must be labelled, everything 

 must be marked. You must faithfully and accurately record all 

 the conditions and all the results. 



Nest, you must correctly interpret the results of your experi- 

 ments. And this is by no means an easy matter. Every now and 

 then it seems as if the natural and physical sciences, and agricul- 

 ture, and medicine, which depend so largely upon the natural and 

 physical sciences, take a retrograde motion ; they seem to move 

 backwards ; and whenever that retrograde motion seems to take 

 place, you may depend upon it that the cause lies in the misinter- 

 pretation of experiments. We have found it so in chemistry. 

 Experiments that have been carefully conducted and faithfully 

 recorded have been incorrectly interpreted ; their meaning was 

 not fully understood. So it is in agricultural experiments. Per- 

 haps in no department of human thought and work have there 

 been grosser misinterpretations than in agriculture. Misinterpre- 

 tation, tlien, has retarded agriculture. It is only by experiments 

 accurately conducted, faithfully reported, and correctly inter- 

 preted, that we can hope for progress. 



It is also necessary to repeat experiments. You will find in all 

 our scientific works statements like this : Mr. So and So found by 

 experiment that a given acid and a given alcohol produced a new 

 ether. Subsequent observers have not been able to confirm his 

 observations. As in chemistry so in agriculture, it is important 

 to have the same experiment repeated many, many times in order 

 to see if there were any errors in the first results. 



Have any experiments ever been conducted in this way ? More 

 than twenty years ago an English gentleman of wealth, then, and 

 still extensively engaged in the manufacture of superphosphate, 

 marked out for himself a course which his friends must have 

 regarded as exceedingly whimsical. lie engaged tlie services of 

 a chemist, and of chemical assistaftts besides, and then commenced 

 a course of agricultural experiments. During the first year he 

 devoted himself to the solution of a single question ; a question 

 which any American farmer, out of this State, would have decided, 

 very likely, by one season's experiment, in what leisure he could 

 have obtained, and upon some small place on the farm. But the 

 gentleman to whom I refer devoted a largo tract to this special ex- 

 periment ; it was accurately conducted, faithfully reported, riglitly 

 interpreted, and became incorporated into agricultural science. 



