6 TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY REPORT. 
HISTORY OF THE STATION. 
Doubtless there may have been an expectation that on this occa- 
sion the history of the Station and the results it has accomplished 
would be presented more or less in detail. The history of the 
Station may best be read in what the institution now is and what 
it stands for, and its results in common with those of similar institu- 
tions are exemplified in the greatly increased application of 
exact knowledge to agricultural practice. Nevertheless a few facts 
may be interesting and pertinent: 
The Station began its operations on the first day of March, 1882. 
The building equipment then consisted of a mansion house and an 
ordinary set of farm buildings; we now have fifteen buildings 
devoted to our use with five more assured and others whose per- 
spective is definitely outlined in the field of hopeful expectation. 
The sum annually available for maintenance for the first few years 
was $20,000; it is now nearly $90,000. The staff at first numbered 
five persons; it now numbers thirty-one. In the beginning there 
was here no laboratory or other equipment — now we have seven 
laboratories equipped for work of a special character, to say nothing 
of barns and other buildings of a modern type. These are the 
material evidences of growth. 
VAGUE IDEAS AT FIRST. 
The essential fact to consider is the touch we have with agri- 
cultural practice. I once asked a member of the first Board of 
Control what that Board expected the Station would do. His 
answer was, “ We did not have very clear ideas.” Not only were 
the internal conceptions of the Station’s functions dimly outlined 
at first, but the public, while expectant, was to a large degree sus- . 
picious that the new: effort was fanciful in its origin and would be 
‘impractical in its results. In the earlier days there were those 
who lost no opportunity to criticise. A Buffalo editor wrote of 
an early report something like this: “It is said that figures do 
not lie. If this be true, the report of the New York Agricultural 
Experiment Station contains a tremendous pile of truth.” 
CALLED IT A HUMBUG. 
The able and versatile paper, The Sun, published an editorial in 
March, 1887, in which the following language occurs: “It is 
enough to make an earnest American despair of the future of democ- 
