108 EXPEKIMENT STATION EECOED. 



respiration calorimeter, although it calls for adequate laboratory 

 equipment, and it is not necessarily beyond the means of an institu- 

 tion, although ordinarily expensive. Studies that would doubtless 

 cost less than the customary feeding trials might well yield far 

 more to enrich the body of established fact and make the next step 

 possible. After all it is largely a matter of attitude and spirit, for 

 with these the means will follow. 



A by-product of nearly every serious investigation in feeding is a 

 series of problems which are suggested as needing investigation. 

 This is the experience of every keen investigator. He encounters 

 questions which he needs light upon, and when he undertakes to 

 search them out in the literature he finds they have not been solved — 

 perhaps worked on fragmentarily by several men and then left in 

 the doubtful stage, with an indeterminate degree of finality. 



Many of the large questions in animal nutrition call for coopera- 

 tion which will bring different branches of science to bear upon them. 

 As President Waters has well said : " The animal husbandman must 

 be content to share the plan, the work, and the credit with other de- 

 partments of the station. The besetting sin of our present organiza 

 tion of the experiment station and the cause of much of our super- 

 ficial work is the unwillingness or incapacity of our men to combine 

 themselves into a team and attack a problem as an institution rather 

 than as an individual or as one small department of the institution. 

 . . . We constantly are seeking the lines of cleavage between de- 

 partments of the station when we should be seeking the means of 

 knitting them together into one whole. The latter is the modern prac- 

 tice of well-organized team work, the former ancient and inefiicient 

 individualism." The animal husbandry department furnishes the 

 nucleus, and many will furnish the problems, around which such 

 effective cooperation may be organized. 



Cooperation among institutions working along a common line 

 offers many opportunities for helpfulness. A plan for such coop- 

 eration was outlined by the Committee on Experiments of the 

 American Society of Animal Nutrition several years ago, to include 

 an investigation upon the optimum protein supply of fattening cattle 

 and the digestibility of feeding stuffs with pigs. Thus far, aside 

 from a passing interest of the members of the society, the results 

 have been largely negative and the proposal has not met with the 

 response that was hoped for. However, the committee reported at 

 the last meeting of the society that it still believed the plan " will be 

 of considerable service to experiment station workers in their 

 attempts to solve some of the problems of animal nutrition." It 

 deserves to be tried. The accumulation of a body of comparable 

 data secured in accordance with a common plan and purpose would 

 be an important step and would mean far niore than separate, inde- 



