1902.] STORRS EXPERIMENT STATION — DAIRYING. 255 



figures, but the result. Prof. Atwater did not know whether 

 he was going to get anything practical when he set out upon 

 that line of work. He did not know whether anything prac- 

 tical would come out of it or not. Take another illustration. 

 Some fifty years ago a Frenchman, a little bit of a crank, at 

 least so the people thought, began a line of curious experi- 

 ments by taking glass bottles and putting some meat juice 

 into them, or sometimes a little juice and boiling it, and then 

 plugging up the bottles and letting them stand on the shelf 

 for a few weeks to see what would happen, to see whether 

 anything would grow in it after he had closed it up. He was 

 trying to investigate a subject that was just beginning to 

 interest scientists. That is, he was trying to find out whether 

 living things would appear spontaneously, and without hav- 

 ing fathers or mothers, he was trying to find out whether they 

 would grow in these bottles. That was all there was to it. 

 It was purely a scientific investigation without the slightest 

 conceivable practical result likely to come from it. And yet, 

 little did Pasteur in those days think that he was starting a 

 line of experimentation that was going to lead to the germ 

 theory of disease, and which would revolutionize modern 

 civilization. 



Now, to go a little bit closer. I remember twelve years 

 ago giving a paper before the Board of Agriculture of Con- 

 necticut, at a meeting in Birmingham. I think the subject of 

 that paper was " Bacteria in Milk." I do not know whether 

 there was any person in that audience that did not think I 

 was a crank, and a young fellow who was trying to make some 

 sort of a sensation to rouse the farmers, but I know most of 

 them looked rather doubtful when I talked to them about 

 those little living things in cream and milk and butter, but I 

 know there were one or two of them that thought there might 

 be something in it. Now that paper was, I think, the first 

 address that was given in this country upon the subject of 

 bacteria in milk. If it was not the first, it was one of the first, 

 and whatever may have been the result of that paper, there is 

 no one here today that does not know that the subject that 

 was there broached as a purely scientific investigation, and 

 which did not necessarily have anything practical in it, yet 

 was a subject, the later developments of which have, to a 

 large extent, revolutionized modern dairying. None of you 



