- 6 4 - 



rapidly distributed, probably by market baskets and packages, all 

 over the South of England, until the growth of cucumbers under 

 glass bade fair to become impossible. None of the remedies sug- 

 gested by the very imperfect scientific study of the disease, which 

 alone was possible with our existing equipment for such work, 

 proved of any value ; the only way out has been through the chance 

 discovery of a disease-resisting seedling, but the disasters and impo- 

 verishments which those years of destroyed crops brought in their 

 train have not yet wholly come to light. 



" It is difficult to make the layman appreciate how lamentably 

 deficient is the equipment of Great Britain for dealing with these 

 sorts of problems; although English science in this department as 

 in all others has been distinguished by signal discoveries and by 

 the pioneering work it has done, it has always been unorganised 

 and unsupported by the State. What success has been gained has 

 been due to those qualities of originality and imagination which 

 we may fairly claim as racial characteristics. When we find that 

 in the last financial year for which statistics are available the 

 United States Department of Agriculture expended two and a half 

 million pounds on agricultural research, whereas our Board of Agri- 

 culture only claims to have allocated L. 6910 (i) we get some sort 

 of measure of the relative importance that has been attached to 

 agricultural research in the two countries previous to the Develop- 

 ment Act. 



" Until within the last decade the experimental station at Roth- 

 amsted has represented practically the whole of the work done 

 in this country for agricultural research ; it was the first of all 

 such institutions to be founded, and it has retained its honourable 

 position throughout the whole of its seventy years' record. But 

 Rothamsted owed both its creation and its continued existence 

 to the munificence of one man, the late Sir John Lawes ; its in- 

 come is less than that of any one of the fifty odd experiment sta- 

 tions that are attached to each of the American States, the appro- 

 priations for which were not counted in the sum of two and a 

 half millions stated above as devoted to research by the Federal 



(l) This is the figure given in a return to the House of Commons paper 

 278, Sept. 14, 1909; but from the published accounts of the Board of Agri- 

 culture it is difficult to see how one-tenth of this sum has been expended. 



6910 are equivalent to 174477 francs. 



The 2 1 / 1 million pounds expended by the United States Department of 

 Agriculture on Agricultural research are equivalent to a sum of 6 3 12 ooo francs. 



