16 



Comparisons are valuable even when drawn between coun- 

 tries differing in climate, conditions and development, whe- 

 ther they deal with recent experiments or with customs and 

 traditions handed down from of old. Experiments carefully 

 carried out over a series of years always teach valuable les- 

 sons, even to countries widely different in climate and na- 

 tural conditions. An American writer recently remarked that 

 no single bit of land has exercised so powerful, beneficent 

 and enduring an influence over the agriculture of the vast 

 territory in the United States so varied in climate, soil and 

 social conditions, as a few acres of land at Rothamsted, in 

 England. Indeed, the persistent experiments, started by Sir 

 John B. Lawes in 1843, an ^ rendered famous by Lawes himself 

 and his life-long co-worker Sir J. H. Gilbert, experiments 

 which have been carried on now over a period of nearly 

 70 years, teach the most valuable lessons to agriculture in 

 all countries, stimulating all to go and do likewise. 



Both field experimentation and laboratory work, besides 

 being of particular national importance, are of universal interest. 

 The patient work, going on these last twenty years at Svalof, 

 is not of interest to Sweden alone, but promotes crop-im- 

 provement the wide world over. Names that are the pride 

 of some nations, as Saussure, Boussingault, Liebig, Pasteur, 

 Claude Bernard, Julius Sachs, H. Hellriegel, Chr. Hansen, 

 M, Maercker, J. Kiihn, have become household words sug- 

 gesting research wherever agricultural science is taught. The 

 admirable organisation of the agricultural experiment stations, 

 by which to-day the United States of America contribute so 

 abundantly to the progress of farming in all countries, has 

 its root and example in the solid ground of German research 

 and German scientific organisation upon which all nations 

 build, receiving day by day new material for increase. 



Exchange of agricultural knowledge between different na- 

 tions has at all times, in some way, been practised. But 

 modern needs require, more than in the past, that knowledge 

 applicable to good and abundant production of the soil be 

 rapidly increased and widely diffused. For now that each 

 country is becoming an important producer of one or another 



