CONDITIONS OF SUCCESSFUL EXPERIMENTING. 327 



love for it, a kind of genius for it, or his experiments will not be 

 worth much to him, or to anybody else. So I do not think it is for 

 all of us to become experimental farmers, to record experiments 

 and make a report of them. That must devolve upon a few. We 

 all know that we now have provision made for some agricultural 

 experiments, and we hope that they will be useful. But so far as 

 we farmers are concerned, I do not think that the man who loves 

 his animals above all things can ever make a good field farmer, or 

 make a' good agricultural experimenter. The man who loves his 

 field crops above all things will never make a stock breeder. We 

 have difierent natural capacities, and we must all devote our 

 efforts to determining which we think will succeed. I would not 

 say to every farmer, " Try experiments, write them down, and 

 record them in the newspapers,'' but I would say, " Try experi- 

 ments year after year;" but I do not think it would be well to 

 report them, because they might not be reported accurately. But 

 upon our own premises we can determine what we can do upon 

 the different soils, and what manure will do upon one piece of soil 

 and upon another. We can all of us be our own experimenters 

 after a pi'actical fashion. And yet I wait with a great deal of 

 impatience for the time when reports shall be given to us by 

 scientific men who are competent to examine the soil, and all the 

 conditions, and report them to us. 



The reports of Messrs. Lawes and Gilbert have been mentioned. 

 Those reports are intensely interesting and of the highest impor- 

 tance to the farmers of Maine. Although their experiments were 

 made in England, under different conditions of soil and climate, 

 no American farmer can read their reports without being the 

 wiser for it. Those experiments were made by men competent 

 to the workr I wish there were a hundred men in the State of 

 Maine competent to make similar experiments. There may be a 

 dozen, there maybe two or three. I. hope we shall hear from 

 them in due time. 



In regard to our friend the lecturer, I do not want to discourage 

 him at all, but I must say he rather damped my ardor in experi- 

 menting. Perhaps what he has said is all true, and it may be that 

 none of us will be discouraged from trying experiments in our 

 own particular locality ; but it is certain that none of us will 

 undertake to become scientific analyzers of soils or crops. 

 • Mr. Samuel Taylor. Samuel Taylor of Fairfield was called 

 upon, and said : 



