RIDICULOUS MISTAKES. 67 



Professor Agassiz said four years ago, that a scientific man 

 could ask more questions in ten minutes than all the Agricul- 

 tural Colleges could answer in a generation ; I think he said, in 

 a century. 



If the Agricultural Colleges with their improved methods and 

 appliances have such a work before them to settle these ques- 

 tions, it will not seem strange to us that such complex questions 

 have not been settled by the occasional imperfect experiments 

 and observations that have from necessity been made. Fortu- 

 nate has been the man who has observed and learned how to 

 manage his own grounds. But in many cases such fortunate 

 ones have made others unfortunate by inducing them to under- 

 take the same thing, when difference of locality or some other 

 unknown quantity, changed the result. 



I -wish to call your attention especially to the great difficulty 

 we have in securing reliable data from those not trained to ob- 

 serve. Persons may be intelligent, and learned even in some 

 directions, and yet if they have not been trained to scientific 

 processes of observation and experiment, they are very likely to be 

 imposed upon or at least to leave out some important element 

 essential to be considered in drawing sound conclusions. Every 

 scientific man sees accounts of certain experiments or observa- 

 tions relating to his own department of study, in which the error 

 of the experimenter or observer is perfectly apparent to him. 

 Some of these mistakes are made as regularly every year as the 

 leaves come out or the crops ripen. 



Almost every year we see accounts in the papers that sulphur 

 has fallen in a thunder shower. Where lightning strikes there is 

 a strong odor, very much like the smell from the burning of gun- 

 powder. Thomson poetically represents the thunder cloud as 

 charged with bitumen and sulphur. Putting all these things 

 together, there is a notion on the part of many that sulphur is 

 in some way connected with thunder and lightning. And when 

 after a powerful thunder storm they find a fine, yellow powder 

 around the edges of the pools, it is not strange that they should 

 suspect it to be sulphur. But the strange thing is that this yel- 

 low powder, which is simply the pollen of plants, should be mis- 

 taken for sulphur every year, when the simplest test, that of 

 burning it, would show it to be as unlike sulphur in its proper- 

 ties as any substance well could be that would burn at all. A 



