No. 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 325 



THE PENNSYLVANIA EXPERIMENT STATION, ITS WORK 



AND LESSONS 



PROF. R. L. WATTS, Dean Experiment Station, State College, Pa. 



Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen; Friends and Farmers' In- 

 stitute Workers: Some time ago I was told a story of a boy who 

 had been given a very large toad as a pet and lie kept his toad out 

 in the yard where he could see it every day. A great many things 

 about the toad interested the boy; but the thing that interested him 

 most was the great variety of food the toad would eat. He took out 

 little crumbs of bread; he would catch bugs and flies and even give 

 the toad little pieces of tobacco sometimes. It seemed to oat every- 

 thing with relish, and one day he found a very large, fuzsy, wooly 

 worm and was wondering whether the toad would eat that worm. 

 He took it out and the toad ate the worm and seemed to enjoy it. 

 Later in the day he thought he would go back and see how the toad 

 was, and he went and found the toad on its back with its feet stick- 

 ing straight up into the air, tickled to death. Now that is about the 

 way I feel when I come before an audience of friends, institute work- 

 ers, I might say co-workers, because I have worked with many of 

 you at the Farmers' Institute. I am afraid though that instead of 

 being "tickled to death" to-night you are just about frozen to death 

 and I am going to make my remarks very brief. 



I have quite a number of pictures, but we will pass them through 

 rapidly. The longer I live the more impressed I am with the fact 

 that successful farming depends very largely upon the application of 

 correct principles, that if you do not apply correct principles, your 

 farming will not be successful. In other words, if you don't know 

 that a thing is right when you do it, the chances are that your at- 

 tempt will be a failure. I am going to illustrate that point by refer- 

 ring to a few personal experiences. One time I was down in Wash- 

 ington county, or Greene, I have forgotten which, attending a 

 Farmers' Institute, and at the close of the afternoon session a farmer 

 invited me to inspect his orchard. I went with him in his buggy to 

 the orchard two or three miles distant, looked over the trees and 

 made this remark; I said, "I believe that the thing that will help 

 your orchard more than anything else is a liberal application of 

 stable manure." T have never forgotten how the farmer was shocked 

 by that statement. "What? Stable manure in an orchard?" "Oh," 

 he said, "I don't agree with you at all." I said, "All right, you don't 

 need to, but that's my judgment." Now I don't know that that 

 was the thing that his orchard needed, but I thought it was the thing 

 he should do to that orchard. Now if that same man or other men 

 should ask me the question concerning an old orchard that was 

 starved to death, I would say without doubt that that is a thing 

 that should be done. Why should I say that with such conviction? 

 Because our own experiment station, your experiment station at 

 State College, has found, by experimentation on a large scale on 

 different soil, types that there are many cases where a liberal ap- 



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