520 EXPERIMENT STATION EECOED. 



scientific research. The U. S. Department of Agricidture has the 

 advantage of a broader constituency, and to a certain degree, of 

 hirger freedom in its choice of subjects for investigation, yet, it too, 

 perhaps even more than the stations, feels the pressure for popuhir 

 approval. The problem is really one of educating our constituency. 



It seems yet an open question how far it will prove possible for 

 the experiment stations, Avith their pressing practical problems, to 

 enter vigorously and aggressively into pure scientific research in the 

 immediate future, either in this or other fields. The passage of the 

 Adams Act has made this a live question, and it is most earnestly to 

 be hoped that this fund will be used scrupulously in accordance with 

 the spirit as well as the letter of the law, and that the reflex influence 

 of this will extend to expenditures under the Hatch Act as well. 

 State problems should be studied at the expense of the State and the 

 national funds used for those broader investigations which are to 

 benefit the whole country. It is to these funds and to those of the 

 National Dejoartment of Agriculture that we must look for the 

 promotion of comprehensive schemes of fundamental investigation 

 whose results will become the common property of investigators 

 everywhere. 



I am inclined to see possibilities for larger service in this direction 

 on the part of the U. S. Department of Agriculture than, I think, are 

 some of my colleagues. Suppose, for example, that the Department 

 were able to undertake a comprehensive scheme of investigation 

 upon stock feeding corresponding to that which it is conducting 

 so successfully in human nutrition. '\'\T^iile the Department could 

 hardly hope to find an Atwater to organize and direct the undertak- 

 ing, yet with even a moderate degree of tact it surely ought to be able 

 to attract the interest and confidence of the stations to its work, so 

 that it would be to their manifest advantage to correlate their investi- 

 gations with its own, whether officially or unofficially. For one, I 

 can hardly doubt that such a course, patiently adhered to, without 

 effort for notoriety and depending on moral authority alone, would 

 be a powerful influence in favor of unity of work and of the study of 

 fundamental questions by scientific methods, as well as in training 

 men in the methods of investigation. That the same methods might 

 be applied to quite other lines of investigation is, of course, too 

 obvious to require mention. Indeed, it is a phase of the vexed ques- 

 tion of cooperation which seems to me well worth careful thought — 

 the essence of the method, of course, lying in the personality of its 

 executor. 



After all is said, however, it may be questioned whether, in the pres- 

 ent temper of the public mind, the more abstract forms of scientific 

 research can be adequately maintained by institutions dependent en- 



