INDIAlJfA HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY, 575 



theorem Avhich said that the sum of the square of two sides is equal to the 

 square of tlie hypotenuse. We had to prove tliat in geometry. If you 

 will take a right triangle of which the sides are three, four and five feet, 

 or any multiple of that number, you have laid out a right triangle, and 

 you have one corner of a four-sided parallelogram. It will have to be 

 square as the other sides are all of the same length. When we laid out 

 the square we took twenty, thirty and forty feet, and marked and put 

 stakes there. Of course it came out perfectly square. This was just a 

 little bit of an everyday application of college training to common every- 

 day work. So then, as I think we will have to leave the illustration, our 

 college training contributes largely to our actual work. It contributes a 

 knowledge of fuudamontal principles. And this is a big tiling in agricul- 

 ture today. A man should understand cause and effect. If you would 

 hang a curtain right here and put a stick through ten feet long anyone 

 would know that if you move this end of the stick this way the other end 

 will move the other way. Now through all the mysteries of farming 

 there are certain underlying principles which are just as true as this little 

 illustration. If this is so something else must be so. It requires a trained 

 mind to know whAt the cause and what the effect is. You often attribute 

 the effect to the wrong cause, and it takes a long time to find out the 

 cause, which the college gives. Let us take an illustration from the field 

 of which we are pleased in the text books to call Agricultural Physics. 

 Take the soil. A Kansas man studied the soil problem as to why his 

 crops did not get ripe, and he found that it was on account of lack of 

 moisture, and he -also believed that there was enough rain fell in the 

 year to raise the crops if he could only save it. He studied the movement 

 of the water through the soil and said to himself. "If I will stir the soil 

 so much water will not evaporate." And he tried it. After three or four 

 years he proved that he was right. He succeeded in conserving enough 

 moisture to ripen his crops. It took him years to prove that. We can 

 take a young man or a young woman three weeks and prove to them 

 accurately and concisely this same principle, and prove it to them con- 

 clusively. We would take two cups of soil. Let one bake and keep the 

 other one moist with water. Let one stand and the surface will bake. 1 

 should say that when we started this test, both cups of soil were just 

 alike. Let one stand without breaking the surface and it will bake. Take 

 a knife, or sharp stick, or something of the sort, and break up the latter 

 one. It will hold more of the moisture. When you weigh these cups 

 which weighed the same to begin with, you will find that the one with 

 the baked surface does not weigh so much as the other one. I believe 

 in the laboratory last winter this was tried, and it was found that one 

 of the cans had lost one-half pound and the other one had lost two and 

 one-half pounds. In other words the one with the baked siu-face had 

 lost five times as much as the other one in a given length of time. 



Did you ever try to unite a piece of lamp wick with another piece by 



