Kansas Academy of Science. 319 



THE SCIENTIST ON THE FARM. 



Lyman C. Woostek. 



IN TIMES PAST the scientist and the farmer have not been 

 especially congenial companions. The scientist has found 

 in the farmer too much to be corrected, and even censured, 

 and the farmer has found in the scientist too much that seems 

 to him to be visionary and uncertain to make these two, who 

 ought to be the best of friends, seek each other's society. 

 Farmers have been known to go miles out of their way to avoid 

 passing a schoolhouse where a scientist had been advertised to 

 lecture. One or two reasons for this incompatibility may well 

 be mentioned here. 



Farmers generally have been well trained in times past in the 

 deductive methods of reasoning. The certainties of mathemat- 

 ics and the traditions of their forefathers were emphasized at 

 home and in the public schools. The phases of the moon fixed 

 the date of his sowing, planting and butchering ; while drought, 

 insect pests, and rust and smut were evils to be endured or 

 exorcised by the priest. 



The scientist, an expert in all forms of inductive reasoning, 

 adds his own observations and experiments to those of a 

 hundred other scientists, and thus reaches conclusions of far 

 higher validity than those reached by a long chain of his an- 

 cestors through chance experiences. To be sure, new obser- 

 vations and experiments may lift his conclusions to higher and 

 still higher planes of certainty, but these generalizations must 

 always have far higher validity than the traditions of the 

 fathers. 



Of all people engaged in industrial pursuits the farmer is 

 most in need of the power of prophecy, for he is surrounded 

 by variables. The weather, his crops, his animals and his 

 hired help are all in a condition of change, favorable to his in- 

 terests or sometimes against them, and always requiring the 

 powers of a scientist-seer to foretell the outcome. 



THE SCIENTIST-FARMER. 



When a scientist becomes farmer he at once takes up the task 

 of elevating his conclusions to higher and still higher planes 

 ol validity. To do this he becomes in turn geologist, chemist, 

 physicist, botanist and zoologist. 



