AGRICULTURAL. EDUCATION 15 



alike over its whole extent, and the growth and produce' of each plot separately examined 

 for two years before the experiment upon it begins. Agricultural Transactions of Scotland. 

 1861-5, page 116. Then for the effect of one manuring you must wait several years, and 

 repetition then is requisite. I give, as an example, a case taken from the New York Weekly 

 Tribune for Feb. 10, 1875, where a man burned a quantity of brush on sod ground. A corn 

 crop, an oat crop, and one clover crop showed no effects, but the third year the clover 

 stood double on the portion where he httd burned the brush. The writer pertinently asks, 

 "Had I applied a different kind of fertilizer on my clover, would not the last applied have 

 been likely to receive all the credit?" 



I cannot go farther into the discussion of exact experiments. But I bold that those ex- 

 periments that are to give us a science of agriculture must be left to skilled and scientific 

 hands. Yille must be allowed to grow his plants singly in bottles. Liebig, Boussingault, 

 Lawes, must each take the field he sees himself adapted Tor. I believe these are the most 

 important kind of the two for the college to work at. The results may be more slowly 

 reached, but they are of more permanent and general value. They require also a professional 

 skill, chemical analysis, means of accuracy that the ordinary farmer cannot command. Is 

 it not best to free institutions that can try these experiments from any over burden of the 

 rougher kind that are within the means or many? 



I should regard highly the criticisms of good farmers on our general farm management, 

 pur stock, our implements, and on rough experiments. But I believe I do them no wrong, 

 if in the matter of the nice field and feeding experiments we have endeavored to try, I 

 look rather to the verdict of Joseph Harris, who was once associated with Lawes and Gilbert, 

 and is a good chemist and practical farmer ; of Professor Johnson of Yale, and some half- 

 a-dozen others who know the requirements of strict experimenting; if I believe with Liebig 

 that professional skill is here required. I know that these men, that George Geddes, that 

 Lawes and Gilbert of England, have taken a deep interest in our experiments, and have 

 praised them highly, as exceptions to the general indefinite experiments that usually are 

 made. I believe that the State has just reason to be proud of the position the college ha* 

 taken in this matter, as it has in its establishment of a successful school of agriculture. You 

 will find that the good fame of the Agricultural College has gone hand in hand with the rest 

 of the fame of this State for success in promoting a high and widely diffused education.* 



COLLEGE MUST EXPEIUMENT. 



Although experiments are not the main object of the college, yet they are a very impor- 

 tant object. There are abundant reasons why we cannot afford to do without them. 



That the progress of science is slow excuses no one from efforts to further it. Rough 

 experiments it should do to some extent, because it should help along and illustrate 

 all the movements that aid farming, and because at slight additional cost it can perform 

 them. But it should particularly show examples of that rigid experimenting which is costly 

 from minuteness of care, and valuable in proportion to its extreme exactness. It ought to 

 possess the means and skill for teaching the determination of questions to the utmost attain- 

 able degree of precision, so that its graduates and students may go oat qualified to help ag- 

 riculture to become a science. 



Not that these same graduates in their farm experiments would be as minute, generally, 

 as the example given them. But they would be more exact, would understand the con- 

 ditions present, and of those lacking more accurately, and interpret the results more consis- 

 tently with the conditions of the experiments. Field and feeding experiments enough to 

 afford ample means of study, and excite enthusiasm, as many, indeed, as the limited means 

 of the institution admit of, should be carried on. The rest of the farm and stock would af- 

 ford illustration iu study, and serve, as I shall by and by show, another indispensable 

 purpose. 



In such experiments the college has already shown its skill. Great pains was taken to 

 make the experiments exact. There has been debate as to comparative value of small and 

 large plats; most exact experimenters using small ones. We have combined the advantages 

 of both large and small plats. Eight small plats fertilized with bone dust make quite a field 

 taken together, and are in the aggregate no smaller because interspersed with eight of 

 Berry's superphosphate, and eight of Bough's superphosphates, and still more of plats un- 

 manurcd. The intermingling of one considerable field with another, like the black and 

 white squares of a chess board, reduces the error of inequalities of soil which mere eight 

 and handling cannot detect. 



Although for reasons that seem sufficient to the honorable board of experienced farmers 

 and others that have the college in charge, these experiments have been suspended for a 

 few years, the college is ready to resume them, and must do so for educational, if no other 

 purposes. 



I take pleasure in appending to thin address, a letter from Joseph Harris, dated Feb. 26, 1675, regarding 

 the exact experlmenta of the college, and a list of tbe published experiment*. 



