708 EXPERIMENT STATION EECOKD. 



sand periodicals are received currently. Its books are lent to workers 

 all over the country, loans being made the past year in thirty-nine 

 different States and Territories, serving in this way as a national 

 library of agriculture. 



Such is the present magnitude of the national department which 

 stands for agriculture and for the broader relations of human wel- 

 fare. It is no local institution but is national in the broadest sense. 

 Its constituency is ninety million people who profit by its manifold 

 activities in a thousand ways, and its field is every State and the island 

 possessions, through which its local offices and laboratories and over 

 eleven thousand of its workers are scattered. It has no regard for 

 sectional divisions or political affiliations. Nor does it work unto 

 itself, for in these years of development the principle of cooperation 

 between the Nation and the State has been permanently established. 



The past sixteen years is a remarkable record of growth in resources 

 and responsibilities and lines of endeavor, a growth in which the 

 personnel has been multiplied more than five times and the revenues 

 nearly seven times. This has been built upon a confidence born of 

 accomplishment and a widening view of the functions of the Federal 

 Government. 



The history of the experiment station movement in the United 

 States has often been told in these pages and in other publications. 

 Dr. White, in his admirable paper, reviewed this history in the light 

 of contemporary conditions of agi'iculture and of science, and gave 

 a forecast of future development. 



Starting with the establishment of the first experiment station in 

 Connecticut in 1875, the growth of stations under state patronage 

 was slow and their revenues comparatively small up to the time 

 when the movement became national. These pioneer stations, how- 

 ever, demonstrated the usefulness of such institutions and prepared 

 the public mind and the national legislature for the important step 

 which culminated in the passage of the Hatch Act on March 2, 1887. 

 They furnished a vision and an imagination which enabled a fore- 

 shadowing of the work to be done. 



The inadequacy of the existing basis for agricultural instruction 

 had been realized by tiie agi'icultural colleges for several years, as 

 had been the inability of the colleges under their limited organization 

 to develop that basis as it should be. A convention of representa- 

 tives of the land-grant colleges, held in Washington in 1883, ap- 

 proved a plan for the establishment of a station at each of the col- 

 leges, and a subsequent convention in 1885 reaffirmed this approval. 

 Several bills providing federal appropriation were presented in suc- 

 ceeding Congresses, and strongly pressed by the agricultural col- 

 leges and the then existing experiment stations, but it was not until 



