106 EXPERIMENT STATION RECORD. [Vol.36 



always recognized as a right but rather as a privilege, to be granted 

 to workers in recognition of special merit or accomplishment. 



An interesting modification of this plan has been recently put into 

 operation at the Minnesota Station. It is announced that hereafter 

 station workers will be on the same basis as teachers in the college 

 with respect to vacation. Of the three months' vacation thus pro- 

 vided, it is required that one month be taken for rest and recupera- 

 tion, while in the other two months the station men are expected to 

 go to other institutions for advanced lectures, to observe new labora- 

 tory methods and practices, and in general to gain information and 

 suggestion which will bear particularly on their own special lines 

 of work. This liberal plan gives all men on the station staff, with- 

 out regard to age, an annual opportunity of renewing their enthu- 

 siasm and acquiring the inspiration of new ideas which come with 

 sojourn at another institution and intimate association with other 

 workers. 



At one of the New York meetings during the holidays reference 

 was made to the relatively small part which physics has yet played 

 in the study of problems in agricultural science. The laws of physics 

 are of course applied by agricultural investigators as all science may 

 be employed so far as it comes within the range of the investigator. 

 In this way physics is borrowed to some extent by the workers in 

 soils, in biology, and in other branches of science, who make limited 

 excursions into the domain of that science for such aid and sugges- 

 tion as they may be able to appropriate. But consciously physics as 

 a science has done far less through its exponents to serve farming or 

 influence investigation in it than many other branches of science. 



Physicists have been busily engaged in working out the laws and 

 problems of dead matter, the physical forces, the heavenly bodies, 

 etc., but it is rare to find one who has brought his science to bear on 

 the activities of the living organism. His special point of view and 

 his intimate knowledge of the laws of matter have not been directed 

 toward the problems met in agricultural science. There has been 

 little attempt to relate research in physics to agricultural problems, 

 and almost as little to employ it in agricultural inquiry, which has 

 evidently escaped the physicist's notice. 



Rarely also has the embryo agricultural investigator been led to 

 select physics as a subject for graduate study, or one in which to 

 perfect himself as an aid in his search for causes and explanations. 

 This is probably due to the fact that the subject has not been opened 

 up in its full agricultural importance, and physicists absorbed in 

 other lines of interest have given little attention to elaborating and 

 pointing out its fundamental bearing at many points. The field of 

 the physicist with a distinct agricultural outlook and interest re- 

 mains, therefore, an undeveloped one. 



