STATE EXPERIMENT STATION 203 



This station was the first permanent organization of the 

 kind in America, and has largely grown out of the influence 

 exerted by Professor John Pitkin Norton, a pupil of Johnston 

 in Edinburgh and of Mulder in Utrecht, who in the year 

 1846 became Professor of Scientific Agriculture in Yale Col- 

 lege and by his teachings and writings excited great interest 

 in Agricultural Science and prepared the way for the appli- 

 cation of scientific methods and results to improving our 

 agriculture.— S. W. J. Oct. 1889. 



In a letter written December 21, 1877, Professor 

 Johnson said, "This station w^as obliged to go into 

 operation and work three months before it received 

 anything from the State, and now^ has not enough to 

 pay its liabilities, and will not have for three months 

 to come." The first six months' work, how^ever, com- 

 prised : A continuation of the fertilizer w^ork wiiich 

 Professor Johnson had previously performed for the 

 Board of Agriculture; a series of examinations of 

 seeds, made in a manner to establish their purity and 

 vitality; the commencement of an investigation of the 

 nutritive value of feeding-stuffs for cattle, in connec- 

 tion wdth which Professor Johnson review^ed at 

 length — in his first "Report of Director" — a system 

 of exclusive corn-meal feeding of cattle in winter prac- 

 ticed by Mr. Linus W, Miller, pointing out the neces- 

 sity of consideration of all factors involved in such 

 problems and the unsafeness of ordinary criteria, and 

 calling attention to the fact that "the w^hole subject 

 [of cattle feeding'^] requires to be worked up care- 



* The first analyses of maize fodder, made in this country according 

 to modern approved methods, were those executed in the Shefiield Labora- 

 tory in 1869 by Professor W. O. Atwater, who was then studying with 

 Professor Johnson and who presented the results of this work as a thesis 

 for his doctor 's degree in June of that year. 



