AGRICULTURAL [NSTITUTIONS IN THE UNITED STATES. 357 



Agricultural Institutions in the United 

 States. — The April issue (Vol. xxviii, No. 5) of the Experi- 

 ment Station Record (\J.*>. Department of Agriculture) has an 

 editorial on the co-ordination of State Agricultural Institutions. 

 It is pointed out by the writer that hitherto relatively little atten- 

 tion has been given to the question of the best organisation of the 

 agricultural work of a State as a whole, or to the relations which 

 the various branches of the State's agricultural agencies should 

 sustain toward each other. The tendency has therefore been for 

 each agency to push its claims independently, and to endeavour to 

 increase its importance by broadening the scope of its work at 

 every opportunity. As long as the field was thinly covered and 

 the aggregate of funds employed was small, this tendency 

 attracted little attention. Growth, therefore, went on sporadi- 

 cally, and the competition of institutions was on the whole 

 regarded merely as an indication of their healthy activity. Now, 

 however, administrative officers, legislators, and the general 

 public are awakening to the fact that the country's agricultural 

 institutions are not organised on any consistent, plan, and that 

 they exhibit much heterogeneity of functions and actual over- 

 lapping of work. Competition among them has become insistent 

 and disagreeable, and their demands complex and embarrassing. 

 Naturally, says the writer of the article, the first outcry against 

 the existing order of things is that there is waste of public 

 funds through duplication of work. One of the remedies proposed 

 is to bring all the agricultural agencies of the State under a single 

 control, and to make the dominating feature of this control the 

 business or financial management of the institutions, regardless 

 of their character and purposes. As those agricultural institu- 

 tions have up to the present been developed without any thorough 

 study of their appropriate functions, there is said to be a bewilder- 

 ing variety in the organisation and w r ork of institutions of the 

 same general type in different States, and when any changes or 

 transfers are suggested each institution is apt to defend its 

 present status. As a result, the minds of legislators and the 

 public become confused, and they are unable to determine whether 

 there are really any fundamental principles by which their 

 opinions and action may be safely guided. The distinctive busi- 

 ness of an agricultural experiment station, it is pointed out, is 

 research, and to this its functions should be restricted, though that 

 should involve separation from the agricultural college. The 

 hope is expressed that strong State Departments of Agriculture 

 may be established, whose organisation and work will be distinctly 

 differentiated from those of the colleges and stations, and which 

 will take over from the latter the inspection and administrative 

 work which had grown up in them because there had been no 

 other place for it. The article closes with an animadversion on 

 the building up of heterogeneous institutions where research is 

 incidental and the investigator a business man, or has his time 

 largely spent in teaching, travelling on inspection tours and testi- 

 fvinsr in the courts. 



