710 BXPEEIMENT STATION EECOED. 



Keviewing this new era, Dr. White said : " In the six years since 

 the passage of the Adams Act the work and utility of the stations 

 have enormously increased and expanded. Desultory and inconse- 

 quent experimentation has been largely discontinued; definiteness in 

 experiment work has been more clearly established, and genuine 

 scientific research along all the lines of the natural sciences related 

 to agriculture have been begun." A large and able body of compe- 

 tent investigators has been developed, and the quality and value of 

 their work challenges admiring comparison with the output of the 

 laboratories of the world devoted to pure research in all the branches 

 of biology, chemistry, and physics. Through the station publications 

 and otherwise a body of new truth^ demonstrated or suspected, has 

 been given immediately to the workers in the fields for adoption, 

 scrutiny, or test, and as a result it is probably true that in America 

 scientific agriculture — and that means intelligent agriculture, eco- 

 nomic agriculture — has made greater progress in the last ten years 

 than in all the years which went before." 



In the six years since the Adams Act passed, the revenues of the 

 stations from federal and state sources have nearly doubled, amount- 

 ing in the fiscal year 1912 to practically $3,850,000, while the staff 

 of office^-s and workers has increased nearly 85 per cent, the rolls at 

 the close of 1912 numbering no less than 1,750 persons. 



Dr. White outlined the modern conception of the experiment sta- 

 tion as that of " a scientific laboratory in the fullest and purest 

 sense, given over to varied but purely scientific work, with fields and 

 barns and herds ranking with microscope, balance, and burette as 

 mere implements of research. It is experimental only so far as it 

 may test, on a strictly laboratory scale, the suggestions of research. 

 It is the investigative department of the college to which it may be 

 attached and, as such, may be called upon only to furnish new 

 truths to be taught in the class room and the laboratory, in the exten- 

 sion lecture and on the demonstration farm. With this distinctive 

 and restricted purpose the field of its operation is yet ample and 

 sufficient. . . . 



" The acquisition of knowledge must precede its application, and 

 further real progress in agriculture must, therefore, come not so much 

 from improved instruction in the schools, from increase in our exten- 

 sion teaching, or from demonstration in the field, valuable and impor- 

 tant as these may be, but mainly from research in the station 

 laboratory. . . . 



"And j^et a greater service may the station render to the State. 

 Among all the public institutions, it should stand preeminently to 

 illustrate the persistent, untiring search for truth. . . . For it is 

 the search after truth that is the basis of moral training, and it is the 

 possession of truth that, alone, shall make us free." 



