1919] EDITOKIALr. ' 403 



tinued tests of various fertilizers. In tlie same year a laboratory for 

 work in agricultural chemistry was equipped, funds of $250 a year 

 for two years being allotted by the board of regents. At the end of 

 this time, the legislature took up the matter and provided for the 

 continuation and some extension of the work by special and varying 

 appropriations from year to year. 



Once experimental work was under way, the large area of the 

 State, coupled with its great diversity of agricultural conditions and 

 interests, made quite difficult the concentration of such restricted re- 

 sources as were available. As Professor Wickson states, " there was 

 such a pressure toward diversified knowledge that the experiment 

 station was actually not allowed to classify, correlate, and discrimi- 

 nate, but was forced to take up a bargain-counter business, by re- 

 search into foreign records, by local observation, and by current ex- 

 perimentation, which would supply each of a throng of patrons with 

 the particular goods which he conceived to be desirable to him. The 

 California Station, therefore, laid out little work from its own 

 reasonable conception of what it should do to erect a system of agri- 

 culture locally desirable, as many other State stations had plenty 

 of chance to do. In California it was from the beginning merely a 

 question of doing as much as possible of what the public demanded, 

 and this has been its main problem to the present day." 



One result of the pressure for local experiments, however, ele- 

 mentary, was the splitting up of the Hatch funds when these became 

 available through the establishment and maintenance of four " out- 

 lying culture stations" distributed through the State. The his- 

 tory of these substations is recounted in the article under the sug- 

 gestive heading of "ships that passed in the night." Since these 

 four substations, part of the operations of the central station, and 

 the supervision of all of them were supported by the $15,000 per 

 year of the Hatch fund, it is easy to accept the statement that the 

 financial stringency of the agricultural department of the university 

 was in no way relieved by the Hatch appropriations. 



The closing of the last of the quartet in 1909 after about a decade's 

 operations terminated " the careers of this brood of outlying stations 

 without mourners. Their chief crime was poverty, which restricted 

 their undertakings, reduced their custodians to care-takers, and made 

 it impossible to even aim at results of wide significance. And while 

 they existed they prevented development of the central station from 

 securing additional experts who were needed and from properly 

 equipping such workers as were secured. Their chief contribution 

 to the development of the department was the demonstration which 

 they furnished of interest and activity of the institution in local 

 problems, and this afterwards assisted in securing opportunities for 

 more capable local undertakings." 



