TllK SCIENTIFIC FAliMEK. 33 



in many cases the reasons for selling were founded in the gen- 

 eral spirit of unrest which is an American characteristic, and 

 doubtless, also, in many cases they have bettered their condi- 

 tion by so doing. In most cases, however, I suppose they 

 have sold because they found it yearly more difficult to live. 

 The pressure of competition was becoming too strong for them. 

 They needed to know something which their neighbors knew, 

 or they would not have been able to buy. The majority of 

 these families have doubtless started the down-hill road. 

 Finally, of late years, in the newer states there are many who, 

 no longer able to obtain good land by merely settling on it, 

 have purchased at high prices, and run in debt for it. These 

 families are usually paying very slowly for their land, if at 

 all. Interest is eating them up. Plainly there was something 

 which these people could have learned to their advantage. 



First of all, the farmer needs to know how to reduce the 

 cost of his products. The prices he can not control. He 

 finds his margin of profit insufficient. His one resource 

 is to reduce costs. The farmer is now only passing through 

 an experience which all other industries have encountered, 

 but from which, until lately, the American farmer has been 

 exempt. The farmer knows that costs of manufactured 

 articles have decreased, because he buys them cheaper. 

 When he inquires how costs have been reduced, he will 

 find that in every instance it is the work of scientific men 

 — mainly engineers and chemists. When ho understands 

 this, he should at once be prepared to expect aid from the 

 same source. And he is getting it from that source. The 

 farm-yard fertilizers produced are wholly inadequate to the 

 requirements of many agricultural industries, and commercial 

 fertilizers are bought in enormous quantities. All that we 

 know as to these we have learned from the chemists. The 

 entomologists and botanists have learned the life histories 

 of injurious insects and fungi, and tlie chemists have com- 

 pounded the materials for combating them. When the 

 farmer "bluestones" his seed wheat, he is doing merely what 

 some chemist at some time tauglit some farmer. The mechan- 

 ical engineer fashions the modern farming ini[)lenients accord- 

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