LAND AND OTHER AGNETS OF PRODUCTION 187 



the backwardness of French agriculture in the precise points in which 

 benefit might be expected from the influence of an educated class is 

 partly accounted for by the exclusive devotion of the richer landed 

 proprietors to town interests and town pleasures. 



54. SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH AS A MEANS OF INCREASING 

 AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION 1 



BY M. B. WAITE 



The real reason why science, and particularly chemistry and the 

 biological sciences, have in the past been of so little use to the farmer 

 is because the science itself was weak. Only fragmentary, isolated 

 facts had been worked out; only a few of its principles had been 

 discovered. Bacteria had been known and described to some extent 

 since the days of Ehrenberg (1830). It remained for Pasteur, in 1862, 

 to prove that they were the real cause and not the result of fermenta- 

 tion. He discovered the first bacterial disease, a silk-worm disease, 

 in 1870. A year or two later he proved that anthrax of cattle was 

 caused by a bacillus. Burrill, in 1878, discovered that pear blight 

 was caused by bacteria, the first discovery of a bacterial plant 

 disease. Koch discovered the germ of tuberculosis in 1884. Since 

 that time there has been a continual stream of new and important 

 discoveries in bacteriology of immediate and practical benefit to 

 agriculture. 



The fungous diseases of plants have been known and described for 

 one hundred and fifty years. The number has been added to con- 

 tinually until it runs up into the thousands. Many single species of 

 both cultivated and native plants have from fifty to one hundred 

 fungous enemies attacking them. Not until Millardet discovered the 

 efficacy of Bordeaux mixture in the control of the vine mildew in 1883 

 and published his results in 1885 did we have a satisfactory and direct 

 way of killing these fungous enemies or preventing their attack on the 

 host plant. A new word, "fungicide," had to be added to the dic- 

 tionary. 



Chemistry has done great things for agriculture. It has fur- 

 nished the methods of fertilizing the soil and of securing these fertilizers 

 from the earth potash, phosphoric acid, and nitrogen. It has 



'Adapted from "The Importance of Research as a Means of Increasing 

 Agricultural Production," The Annals, LIX (May, 1915, on "America's Industrial 

 Opportunity"), 41-50. 



