316 EXPERIMENT STATION RECORD. 



In an address delivered at one of the congresses at St. Louis this fall 

 Dr. David Starr Jordan quoted one of his correspondents as criticising 

 the work in agricultural science in this country, where it is more 

 largely endowed than in any other country, on the ground that there 

 was too much striving for practical applications, and not enough time 

 given for the fundamental research on which these applications must 

 rest. " The proportion of applied science in agriculture is too great 

 in this country. While we do not need fewer workers in applied 

 agricultural science, we do need more workers who would devote 

 themselves to fundamental research." 



This is a fair statement of a condition, with no attempt to assign a 

 cause. One of the fundamental causes is undoubtedly the conditions 

 referred to above. Many a station worker is compelled by the char- 

 acter of his college duties to become little more than a consulting 

 expert in his line, confining himself to the answering of correspondence 

 and conducting a few trials or experiments, and is obliged to forego 

 undertaking anything in the nature of an investigation. There can be 

 no gainsaying the fact that this dual service has done much to retard 

 the development of agricultural investigation and to discourage the 

 efforts of investigators of much promise. 



The ultimate result is the only criterion by which the advantage or 

 disadvantage of such a practice can properly be judged. We have 

 had practically fifteen years of experience with it, under a great 

 variety of conditions, and it is certainly a poor theory that will not 

 justify itself in that time. An} T division of a station man's time is 

 unwise, even though his salary may seem to be justified on the theo- 

 retical number of hours he is expected to teach, wdien it defeats the 

 real purpose had in view in adding this man to the station staff and 

 robs him of the opportunity to do work of a high order. 



More men are needed for real investigation, and it is onl} T rea- 

 sonable to expect that conditions will be so shaped that we may make 

 progress in that direction. The kind of men needed for investigators 

 was de tined by one speaker as "a man saturated w T ith the things he is 

 doing, and who shall not be turned aside and wearied by having to 

 drill a class or do anything else but hunt his subject and the truth." 

 Another speaker believed that teaching and investigating "call for a 

 different attitude of mind and the use of a different set of faculties, to 

 a certain extent, and that except in the case of unusually gifted men 

 the same men are not likely to have both sides equally developed. An 

 investigator should have his mind focused on his work more or less all 

 the time," whereas the teacher's thought will be largely pedagogical. 



Considered in the light of the extensive experience which has been 

 had, the most that can be said for the dual arrangement, where any 



