544 



and abroad are substantially aj^reed, that the bulk of the best 

 work of an experiment station is to be done not in the field but in the 

 laboratory, the greenhouse, and the stable. The chief reason for this 

 lies in the lact that in order to obtain definite results of value in agri- 

 cultural researches, as in other lines of experimental inquiry, the 

 experimenter must be able to control the conditions of his investigations ; 

 otherwise it is impossible for him to discover the real cause of any 

 results which he may obtain or to know that these results are anything 

 more than mere accidents. Agriculture in this respect is on the same 

 footing with medicine. The investigator in medical science works iu 

 his laboratory and dissecting room with the microscope, chemicals, ani- 

 mals, and cadavers. He isolates the bacteria, inoculates the guinea- 

 pig, and tries this drug or that course of treatment on the lower animal. 

 Only after he believes that l)y these means he has traced the disease to 

 its cause and has discovered a remedy which can be safely used for the 

 human subject does he begin the treatment of men. Even then he is 

 very careful in the selection of his patients and carries on his experi- 

 ments in well-equipped hospitals, where he has all the appliances which 

 science has devised for the comfort and relief of the diseased, as well 

 as the assistance of trained nurses and skilled helpers. He calls in 

 l)hysicians of experience to watch the progress of the cases undergoing 

 the new treatment, and takes advantage of their criticisms and sugges- 

 tions. After months or 3"ears of the most painstaking research and 

 experimenting the new remedy or treatment, if successful, is published 

 for the use of the ordinary practitioner. But even then the intelligent 

 l)hysiciaii knows very well that the conditions of the average sick-room 

 or the individual peculiarities of the [)atient require the exercise of the 

 nicest judgment in adapting the methods of the laboratory and the 

 hospital to the requirements of the actual practice of medicine. 



It would be absurd to reverse the order of these processes : to con- 

 sider first the individual patient and wait for the investigation of the 

 causes of a disease until some doctor had by good luck hit upon a rem- 

 edy with which he had cured a doze.i patients. Yet this is exactly what 

 the advocates of farm experiments as the chief business of experiment 

 stations would undertake to do. They would do the best they could in 

 a few fields with varying soils, drainage, rain-fall, and sunshine, with 

 exposure to all the vicissitudes of the season, whose deceptive infiuences 

 the farmer so well knows, in the hope that in some lucky hour tliey 

 may find a new method which can be widely api)lied to farm practice. 

 This is the empirical as distinguished from the scientific method, the 

 method of the Middle Ages as compared with that of the nineteenth 

 century. It is because agriculture has been so slow to appreciate the 

 benefits of scientific investigation that it has made such relatively slow 

 progress. The arts, which, like surgery and mechanics, have taken the 

 most complete advantage of the discoveries of the laboratory, Jiave 

 advanced at an astonishing pace. The discoveries with which Pasteur 



