STATES RELATIONS SERVICE. 555 



The report of the Office of Experiment Stations for 1888 states 

 that " farmers' bulletins " and technical monographs on special lines 

 of lesearch had been planned and begun. The farmers' bulletins 

 were to contain " the results of station work bearing upon special 

 topics and the teachings of other research and put the whole into a 

 form so plain that the intelligent farmer will understand it, so 

 brief that he will read it through, and so practical that he will take 

 it to heart." 



The report also quotes with approval from a report of the com- 

 mittee on station work of the Association of American Agricultural 

 Colleges and Experiment Stations, in which the functions of the 

 stations are outlined. In this report it is pointed out that while 

 the stations should carry on practical experiments the results of 

 which may " directly and immediately help the farmer," they should 

 also conduct more fundamental research, for " the prosperity of the 

 enterprises as a whole will be proportioned to its success in the dis- 

 covering of the laws that underlie the right practice of agriculture." 

 The committee also urged that it is — 



A part of the duty of the stations to teach, but to teach only well-attested 

 and useful facts. By publishing information in terse, simple language, with 

 appropriate explanations, by auending farmers' meetings, and demonstrating 

 in lectures and otherwise the things farmers need and desire to know ; by 

 interesting farmers in experimental work, and securing their cooperation in 

 carrying it out ; in short, by diligent effort to carry knowledge to the farmer 

 and help him with it, and at the same time help him to help himself, the 

 workers in the stations will both do their duty and secure the support they 

 need. 



The broad program thus outlined for the stations undoubtedly 

 was intended to meet the situation under which they began their 

 work under the Hatch Act when the agricultural colleges, of which 

 with few exceptions the stations were departments, were for the most 

 part weak institutions with few agricultural students and with 

 practically no funds for extension work. The differentiation of the 

 functions of these institutions as regards research, teaching, and ex- 

 tension work with which we are now so familiar had hardly been 

 thought of or begun. The coming of the Hatch funds made pos- 

 sible the immediate expansion of the faculties of the agricultural 

 colleges. The station workers needed to become acquainted with 

 the agricultural students and the farming people whose problems 

 they w^ere to attempt to solve. It was natural, therefore, to give these 

 experimenters duties also as teachers and extension workers. In 

 this way they immediately did much useful work and secured a 

 large measure of popular support, but at large sacrifice of research 

 and with the arousing of expectations which they could not fulfill as 

 long as they attempted to cover so broad a field. 



DEVELOPMENT OF PUBLICATIONS. 



During the first five years the principal work of the Office of Ex- 

 periment Stations was the organization and development of its pub- 

 lications. The early preparation of a digest of the annual re- 

 ports of the stations for 1888, which contained a summary of the be- 

 ginnings of station work under the Hatch Act, with many references 

 to earlier work in a number of States, opened the way for a serial 

 publication to record continuously their progress in research. 



