INTRODUCTION 



The newness of much that seems to us to have always 

 been comes at times as a surprise, and sets our minds 

 to work in an effort to realize the environment of our 

 immediate forebears at a time when ideas now accepted 

 as fundamental axioms were the glad tidings of a new 

 gospel of knowledge and truth. Only sixty years ago, 

 a little band of friends, born in America and trained in 

 good part in the universities of Germany, was laying 

 here in the new world the foundations of the great 

 work in agricultural science which is being carried on 

 today by men born in America and well trained in 

 American universities. Workers, their methods and 

 their aims make up the early history of every branch 

 of human endeavor. The way in which they opened up 

 the field interests the workers of today. These early 

 enthusiasts looked into the future confident that their 

 work was good and that it ought to be done; they 

 believed that without chemistry it never could be done ; 

 they sought so to raise the standards and improve the 

 methods of chemists that a chemically demonstrated 

 fact should stand unassailable. They had studied 

 under pupils of the men who saw chemistry evolve 

 from alchemy. Some of them lived to follow with 

 admiration the brilliant achievements of such men as 

 Gibbs, van 't Hoff and Arrhenius, which are today 

 establishing the fundamental principles of biochem- 

 istry on which agricultural practice rests. 



From the portrait of a painter looks out the keen 

 eye of the artist. As one gazes into it all the imper- 



