8 EXPEEIMENT STATION RECORD. 



estly to disprove what appears to be true. . . . The only way to be 

 certain you have got at the truth is to go counter to the current of 

 self-complacency. If you can sit down deliberately with your sup- 

 posed facts and with your theories, and try by every imaginable test 

 to find where they do not harmonize or where they do not satisfy 

 strict logic, then and not until then can you be pretty certain that 

 you stand fair and square on that subject." And he adds that it is 

 not the novelty or the glory of discovery, but the genuineness of dis- 

 covery, that is of first importance ! 



But although Dr. Johnson had these high standards for agricul- 

 tural investigation and realized the great need for work of such per- 

 manent character, he did not let this stand in the way of his useful- 

 ness. He was wise enough and zealous enough to patiently set his 

 hand to what he could secure interest and support for, and hence in 

 the early days much of his work was the routine analysis of ferti- 

 lizers and other materials — ^work which needed to be done at that 

 period and which served to develop confidence and support for other 

 lines and for larger undertaldngs. 



An interesting sidelight on the times and showing his genuine con- 

 cern for the farmers' welfare is his caution to them, as early as 1854, 

 against too blind confidence in all that was recommended in the name 

 of science. " Let him beware of false lights which are nowadays 

 hanging out in abundance; let him beware of taking advice from 

 two dangerous characters — the conceited farmer who knows a little 

 science, and the officious philosopher who knows a little farming." 

 Combating the popular notion of the great value of soil analysis as 

 a guide to the farmer, he sums up the case thus : " Soil analysis at 

 best is a chance game; and where one wins a hundred may lose. A 

 soil analysis is always interesting, often valuable, rarely economical." 



A little later he admonished the farmers of his State to beware of 

 setting experience in opposition to scientific truth, and in order that 

 what he wrote might be read he headed the article "American 

 Guano." Contrasting experience and science he declared with em- 

 phasis that there is no antagonism between the two except in error, 

 experience being "many times unsuspecting, blind, or prejudiced." 

 " Science is but another and the true name for all that is good in the 

 experience of all men. . . . Common experience is the native rank 

 but wild growth of knowledge. Science is its trained and cultivated 

 development." 



At the present day agricultural education is emphasizing these 

 truths, and is making common experience more reliable, because more 

 enlightened and less " unsuspecting, blind or prejudiced." 



A recent writer has said that unless the student or investigator of 

 scientific problems has in his conception some infusion of the divine 



