1902.] STORRS EXPERIMENT STATION DAIRYING. 25/ 



vastly greater than that, and to illustrate it allow me to use a 

 somewhat crude figure which will serve, perhaps, to caU your 

 attention to some of the kinds of problems which we have be- 

 fore us. Suppose any one of you should take a ten-acre lot 

 and plow it up, and then harrow it, and pulverize the ground 

 as much as you can, and then you go over it with a rake, and 

 follow that up with a fine toothed comb and comb out every 

 single trace of plant life there is in it, and so that you will 

 leave absolutely nothing, not even a blade, or root, or piece of 

 grass, or a weed, or anything of that sort. Nothing but dirt. 

 You will have a ten-acre lot absolutely deprived of everything 

 in the way of plant life. Then you let that lot alone. Put a 

 fence around it, and keep things out of it so far as you can, 

 and you let it alone for fifty years. What is going to happen? 

 Are any of you wise enough to tell what will be the condition 

 of that lot fifty years from now? No one in the world could 

 tell, but you know very well, in general, what would happen. 

 You know that after a few weeks vegetation would spring up 

 all over it from the seeds in the soil, and from those which 

 were carried there. First there would be plants of certain 

 kinds, and then, in a little while, some others, of different 

 kinds would spring up, and would crowd the first ones out of 

 existence, and that would go on all during the first season or 

 summer. The next season some of those that happened to 

 last through the winter would spring up, and so the thing 

 would go year after year. »These different plants that spring 

 up would light for a rooting in the soil, and for the water of 

 the soil, and for the light and air so as to grow and live. 

 Some would crowd the others out of existence, and so they 

 would fight it out week after week and month after month, 

 and none of you could tell at any particular time, if you 

 should look at that field, what it would be in five years. It 

 would very likely be quite a different field from what it would 

 appear now, and at the end of fifty years nobody could pre- 

 dict what there would be in that field. And, moreover, if you 

 had two fields, each prepared in the same way, and you 

 allowed them to stand for fifty years in that way, the proba- 

 bility is that at the end of the fifty years there would not be 

 much similarity between the plants in the two lots. Now you 

 can see, perhaps, the complexity of attempting to solve that 

 kind of a problem. The x\merican Indian and all early pas- 



Agr. — 17 



