BUKEAU OF ANIMAL INDUSTRY. 17 



competent men to remain after they have learned our methods and 

 had the advantage of a brief period of experience in the laboratory. 



The result is that much of our time is spent in training young men 

 who, as soon as they become competent, are called away to other posi- 

 tions where the salaries are higher. It has been said that these men 

 remain in the country, and the country has the benefit of the training 

 which they have received here; and while this is true, to a certain 

 extent, it does not improve the situation from the farmer's point of 

 view. These men do not necessarily continue in the same line of 

 work; some of them go as teachers where they are no longer engaged 

 in original research; some of them go into commercial nouses, and 

 others may go into medical or veterinary practice. In all of these 

 cases their services are absolutely lost to the field of agricultural 

 investigation. It will probably be generally admitted that the Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture exists for the benefit of the agricultural indus- 

 try, not to educate men for professors in universities, for experts 

 in commercial houses, or for practitioners of medicine. And, while it 

 is desirable that men should be educated somewhere for such lines of 

 work, their training is not a fair compensation to our stock raisers for 

 delay in the solution of urgent and important problems or for failures 

 to bring relief from constant and distressing losses. 



While we stop to train men to fill the places vacated, the expense 

 of maintaining the laboratory goes on, the salaries now established 

 go on, the experiment station must be kept in operation, but the work 

 does not progress as it should. During the past six years the position 

 of chief of the pathological division has three times become vacant, 

 and most of our investigators have been tendered positions with higher 

 salaries than they are receiving here. As it requires at least two 

 years for a new man, however competent he may be by education and 

 preliminary training elsewhere, to become familiar with our methods, 

 to understand our problems, and to get any reliable results from his 

 experiments, it is readily seen that such frequent changes almost 

 prevent the solution of the more serious and complicated questions 

 with which we are confronted. To elucidate the practical questions 

 connected with the control of hog cholera, for instance, requires a 

 long series of experiments without interruption, and conducted by 

 the same person. 



It should be clear, however, that these remarks relative to educa- 

 tional work are not antagonistic to the policy of taking young men 

 from colleges and technical schools into the laboratories and training 

 them for the higher and more responsible positions. This is undoubt- 

 edly the best plan for securing competent and experienced investiga- 

 tors, who upon promotion are able to take up the most advanced work 

 with the least loss of time. It is not the educational process that the 

 writer deplores, but the loss of men from this service almost as soon 

 as they have been fitted for it at such an expense of time and money. 



It is therefore very desirable and, indeed, essential to the successful 

 prosecution of the scientific work which the Bureau should do that 

 the salaries be made equal to those paid in educational institutions and 

 in other branches of scientific work conducted by the Government. 

 There is no apparent reason why a scientific man should work for less 

 compensation in the Department of Agriculture than in other depart- 

 ments of Government service requiring no more training and no 

 greater competency. As a matter of fact, they will not do so, and 

 the work of agricultural investigation suffers accordingly. I would 



AGR 1901 2 



