1916] EDITORIAL. 403 



" Since the last session of our school this movement has made un- 

 usually rapid progress. The permanent national system of agricul- 

 tural extension education, provided for in the Smith-Lever Act of 

 1914, has already become well organized and attained great dimen- 

 sions. In over one thousand two hundred counties, spread over the 

 entire country, extension agents are regularly working. Supporting 

 these local forces are about one thousand five hundred extension spe- 

 cialists and administrative officers maintained by the state colleges 

 and the Department of Agriculture. At least one thousand teachers 

 are giving instruction in agricultural subjects in our colleges, and 

 the numbr of students in four-year courses of agriculture has risen 

 from 14,000 in 1913, to 19,500 in 1915. The past year 4,900 secondary 

 schools gave agricultural courses attended by 95,000 students, as com- 

 pared with 1,400 schools and 30,000 students two years before. The 

 force employed in our agricultural experiment stations has risen to 

 1,860 and the income of the stations in 1915 was $5,286,000. The 

 force employed in the Department of Agriculture is over 16,000 and 

 its income about $25,000,000. 



" The demand for thoroughly trained and efficient workers in agri- 

 cultural lines, whether in research, education or farm practice, has 

 never before run so far beyond the supply. The rsponsibilities of the 

 leaders in the agricultural movement have never been so heavy. Their 

 encouragements have never been so great. This body of young men, 

 who have already been trained in our higher institutions of learning 

 and many of whom are already engaged in teaching or research, have 

 before them exceptional opportunities for leadership and high suc- 

 cess. The incentives to thorough preparation and the most strenuous 

 endeavor are of the highest and broadest character. To discover 

 nature's secrets and thereby advance science and human welfare, to 

 inspire and instruct a vast multitude of men, women, and children in 

 colleges, schools, and millions of homes, to lay a firm and safe founda- 

 tion for the permanent existence and prosperity of the United States 

 and in large measure of all the world — these are the appropriate tasks 

 of agricultural scholars and scientists." 



The course on growth consisted of twenty lectures and nineteen 

 seminars, covering the four weeks of the session and including the 

 general subjects of the dj^namics and elemental chemical synthesis 

 of growth, cell entity or growth organization, and growth relations. 

 In the first week Prof. C. M. Child, of the University of Chicago, 

 gave five lectures on the general dynamics of protoplasm, the organic 

 individual, unity and order in growth, development and evolution, 

 and reproduction. He paid special attention to an analysis of his 

 own experimental studies on the dynamics of form production, as 

 shown by some of the lower animals. The presence of a chief axis 



