676 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION M. 
such as would make agricultural research a tempting, even a possible, com- 
mercial speculation. There is a very limited field for patents or royalties; the 
breeder of a new crop variety can only exploit it with success if he has some 
big commercial organisation behind him, and even then a very few seasons 
place it in everyone’s hands. The solutions to most of the great outstanding 
problems which I have outlined above could not be sold at a price, however 
much they might improve the output of every farmer. Indeed, there is this 
character about the advances which science may make in agriculture, and it 
explains the lack of interest in research exhibited by many hard-headed farmers, 
that the benefit comes to the community rather than to the individual. Farmer 
is competing with farmer, and if production is raised all round the price is 
apt to drop correspondingly, so that shrewd men who are doing very well as 
things are, are very content with their limited vision, provided the general 
ignorance remains unenlightened. However, we need not argue this point ; every 
civilised country has accepted the necessity of maintaining agricultural research ; 
even Great Britain, the last home of go-as-you-please, has fallen into line within 
the last year or two. 
Assuming that the State pays, shall the immediate organisation and control 
of the work remain with the State direct, or be placed in the hands of semi- 
official bodies like the Universities? The character of the work required must 
settle this question. We may as well make up our minds at the outset that 
agricultural research is a very complex affair, which is going to arrive at com- 
mercial results very slowly. It deals with the fundamental problems of life 
itself ; its problems mostly lie in the border country where two or more sciences 
meet, the debatable land which the man of pure science distrusts and affects to 
despise because there his clean and simple academic methods do not apply. 
Hence we have to attract to research in agricultural matters minds of the very 
best quality, men of imagination and determination, and give them scope and 
freedom to make the best of themselves. Now it has been recently claimed 
that the nation can only attract men of the necessary quality to research by 
instituting some system of prizes that shall be commensurate with the rewards 
that lie before the successful lawyer or business man who has embarked upon 
some competitive commercial career. I entirely dissent from this view; the 
quality of a man’s work is not to be measured by the results it happens to 
attain, for results are often matters of luck, but least of all is to be measured 
by the amount of public attention the results arouse. It is in the nature of 
some kind of discoveries to excite the popular imagination, but these discoveries 
do not necessarily involve more credit to the discoverer than many others whose 
burial-place in this or that volume of ‘ Transactions’ is only known to a select 
few. Once make publicity the criterion, and the scientific man is at the mercy 
of the boom and the advertisement; a good newspaper manner is more valuable 
than high thinking. Moreover, I would for the man of science say with 
Malvolio: ‘I think nobler of the soul.’ Give him a living wage and proper 
opportunities and he will give his best work without the added inducement of 
a chance of making his fortune. The real point is the living wage, and this 
does not mean the starveling price at which a man can be bought just after 
taking his degree. At present the career of research has some of the aspects 
of a blind-alley employment ; the young man enters on it with enthusiasm, only 
to find ten years later that he has no market value in any other occupation and 
that he is expected to continue on an artisan’s wage. 
We have then to ensure the scientific man continuous employment; in suck. 
special subjects as agricultural science presents, we cannot trust to pick him 
for a particular job, and let him go when it is finished; there must be some 
reasonable sort of a career in investigation. The State cannot simply pay for 
results; men will not qualify for such precarious chances of employment. The 
great results come as incalculably as the great poetry, their value is similarly 
untranslatable into the cash standard, and though no provision of posts can 
ensure a supply of the finest flowers of the mind, routine science has this 
advantage over routine poetry, that it has some value and is even necessary 
to bring to fruition the advances of the pioneers. And when the great mind 
does happen to be born, he can only be turned to account if an organisation 
exists within which he can find opportunities for work. Now such an organi- 
