STATE EXPERIMENT STATION 203 



This station was the first permanent organization of the 

 kind in America, and has largely grown out of the influence 

 exerted by Professor John Pitkin Norton, a pupil of Johnston 

 in Edinburgh and of Mulder in Utrecht, who in the year 

 1846 became Professor of Scientific Agriculture in Yale Col- 

 lege and by his teachings and writings excited great interest 

 in Agricultural Science and prepared the way for the appli- 

 cation of scientific methods and results to improving our 

 agriculture. S. W. J. Oct. 1889. 



In a letter written December 21, 1877,- Professor 

 Johnson said, "This station was obliged to go into 

 operation and work three months before it received 

 anything from the State, and now has not enough to 

 pay its liabilities, and will not have for three months 

 to come." The first six months' work, however, com- 

 prised: A continuation of the fertilizer work which 

 Professor Johnson had previously performed for the 

 Board of Agriculture; a series of examinations of 

 seeds, made in a manner to establish their purity and 

 vitality; the commencement of an investigation of the 

 nutritive value of feeding-stuffs for cattle, in connec- 

 tion with which Professor Johnson reviewed at 

 length in his first "Report of Director" a system 

 of exclusive corn-meal feeding of cattle in winter prac- 

 ticed by Mr. Linus W. Miller, pointing out the neces- 

 sity of consideration of all factors involved in such 

 problems and the unsafeness of ordinary criteria, and 

 calling attention to the fact that "the whole subject 

 [of cattle feeding*] requires to be worked up care- 



* The first analyses of maize fodder, made in this country according 

 to modern approved methods, were those executed in the Sheffield Labora- 

 tory in 1869 by Professor W. O. Atwater, who was then studying with 

 Professor Johnson and who presented the results of this work as a thesis 

 for his doctor's degree in June of that year. 



