EXPERIMENT STATION RECORD. 



Vol. XXV. Decembek, 1911. ' No. 8. 



The death of Hon. Norman J. Cohnan, first Secretary of Agri- 

 culture, calls to mind the beginnings of the American system of 

 experiment stations and his sei*vices at that formative period. 



Mr. Colman entered upon his duties as Commissioner of Agri- 

 culture on April 8, 1885. He came with the avowed conviction that 

 the i^osition was one of large importance and should be made a 

 Cabinet office, that the Department's work should be strengthened, 

 and that experiment stations for the benefit of agriculture should be 

 established with Government aid in every State in the ITnion. The 

 attainment of these and other ends for the advancement of agi'iculture 

 and the recognition of its position he laid before President Cleve- 

 land as his progi-am of action, in the interview preceding his appoint- 

 ment. That the latter looked with favor upon such a program is 

 indicated by his selection of Mr. Colman out of a list of some thirty 

 persons who were being considered for the commissionership. 



When Mr. Colman came to the Department he found experiment 

 jr^tations in some ten or eleven States, working quite independently 

 and without reference to one another, with no medium for exchange 

 of views or agency for the promotion of their common interests, and 

 no means except the press for giving wider publicity and application 

 to their work. Most of them were small, struggling institutions with 

 meager funds for maintenance, and several of them had no regular 

 series of bulletins, but published thejr results only in newspapers or 

 college catalogues or reports, where they were not widely accessible. 



The development of the experim^t station as an American insti- 

 tution remained to be worked out, and there was little or no united 

 effort in that direction. The European station had been transplanted 

 to a quite different environment, and around its successful adaptation 

 centered many problems of organization, management, function and 

 relationship, which needed to be worked out. This called for a closer 

 union between the stations, an exchange of experience and views, and 

 an extension of their interests beyond the boundaries of their resjoec- 

 tive States. 



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