31 6 SCIENCE IN AFRICA 



Although the responsibility for research lies entirely with the 

 departments of agriculture and animal health, the application of 

 the results of research in improving native agriculture often comes 

 into the domain of other departments. As a rule field agricultural 

 officers demonstrate methods of improved cultivation, but they 

 can do little without full co-operation from administrative officers, 

 who must often take the lead themselves, so that some knowledge 

 of agriculture is coming to be of great importance to administrative 

 officers. In many territories it is realized that the work of putting 

 results of research into practice among native peoples has grown 

 too large to be undertaken by the agricultural and administrative 

 officers, and therefore subordinate staffs of trained African agricul- 

 turalists are being built up. This question of subordinate staff is 

 perhaps of more importance in agriculture than in any other sub- 

 ject: it is discussed in An African Survey, Chapter XIII. 



The British staff of the agricultural departments is recruited 

 from persons who already have university degrees. After selection 

 they spend a year at the Cambridge School of Agriculture, and 

 then go to the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture at Trini- 

 dad for a second year before taking up their appointments. The 

 Cambridge and Trinidad years have been arranged to constitute 

 a continuous two years' course for the various kinds of specialists 

 and field officers required. Similar arrangements exist in the case 

 of probationers for the colonial veterinary services. In view of the 

 heavy expenditure entailed by such training and the fact that 

 every new agricultural officer absorbed into the departments has 

 received training to equip him for research, there is a certain 

 anomaly in the amount of time that they are required to devote to 

 duties for which such training is scarcely required, and which in 

 other territories, notably the French colonies, is entrusted to 

 auxiliary African staff. 



The East African Agricultural Research Station at Amani, as one of the 

 projected chain of central research stations in the tropical Empire, 

 is designed to serve all the East African colonies in the investiga- 

 tion of problems which have a general rather than a local applica- 

 tion. It is devoted entirely to long-term research, but at present its 

 activities are limited by a lack of funds which is reflected in the 

 small number of the personnel. In its comparatively short exis- 



