March 14, 1902.] 



SCIENCE. 



431 



Agriculture is simply the business of grow- 

 ing plants and selling their products, either 

 directly iu the form of crops or indirectly 

 in the form of the animal body into which 

 they have been converted. 



Affecting this are soil and climatic con- 

 ditions, the market, the farmer's knowledge 

 of the plants he grows and of the best methods 

 for marketing their products. 



JSTone of these factors has anything to do 

 with state boundaries. The fact that wheat 

 is grown in a certain state is of no more, nor 

 indeed of as much, significance as the fact 

 that it is grown along a certain line of rail- 

 way. A State boundary is a fiction of some 

 political, but of absolutely no scientific im- 

 portance whatever. A range of mountains or 

 a river, on the other hand, is of tremendous 

 significance so far as its effect on plant life 

 is concerned. The northern and southern 

 boundaries for a state like Kansas, two hun- 

 dred miles wide, may be of some importance 

 scientifically, as representing whatever dif- 

 ferences in fauna or flora may be found re- 

 sulting from the rather slight difference in 

 the mean annual temperature of the two re- 

 gions. But from the standpoint of scientific 

 agriculture there is not a tithe of the sig-- 

 nificance in such a difference north or south 

 from the center of this State as in the two 

 hundred miles east or west of that point. 

 Still more strikingly is the same fact exempli- 

 fied in the states of Oregon and Washington. 



The significant thing to know is not wheth- 

 er a given crop can be raised in the state of 

 Oregon or in the state of Washington, but 

 whether it can be raised in the region east of 

 the Cascades, where there is a small annual 

 precipitation and great evaporation, or west 

 of the mountains where the reverse is true. 



What does it convey to a scientific mind to 

 say that such and such varieties of wheat are 

 best for Ohio or Nebraska, when regional or 

 climatic conditions within these states may 

 furnish areas which demand wheat varieties 

 of the most diverse character? Politically a 

 state is a plane surface, holding a certain 

 number of inhabitants subject to exactly the 

 same civil laws. 



Scientifically regarded, a state is an arbi- 



trary block of territory chopped out at ran- 

 dom, sometimes consisting of some vast 

 physiographic domain of mountain, forest or 

 prairie, sometimes comprising portions of all 

 these within its imaginary boundaries. 



One would naturally suppose that in the 

 location of agricultural experiment stations, 

 the points alone considered would be physio- 

 graphic and meteorological ones. For scientific 

 purposes, for example, one station in the 

 western fourth of any one of those portions of 

 the earth's surface called North Dakota, South 

 Dakota, Nebraska or Kansas could more effi- 

 ciently solve the problems of that whole vast 

 region than can the present four stations, each 

 of which is located outside of the high plains 

 area, and in the eastern part of its geographic 

 fiction, the state, which represents in each 

 case in the eastern and western portions, such 

 opposing facts of climate and topography. 



One would naturally suppose that a geo- 

 graphical area of 62,000 square miles, of such 

 very similar conditions as regards soil, climate 

 and physiography as are found in the 

 New England states, would scarcely need be 

 provided with as many stations for experi- 

 ment in agriculture as the region of 262,000 

 square miles which we call Texas, and which 

 contains such diverse climates as are found 

 in the humid tropical region of Brownsville, 

 the desert tropical of El Paso, and the high, 

 cool, semi-arid area of the Staked Plains. Yet 

 we find six stations in the former and one in 

 the latter geographic area. 



The inconsistency involved in the absurdly 

 unscientific location and distribution of our 

 experiment stations is seen at a glance on a 

 map of the United States having the stations 

 prominently marked. Two stations dominat- 

 ing similar areas so far as agriculture is con- 

 cerned, and of necessity dealing with precisely 

 the same problems are found located ten miles 

 from each other. But because they are in the 

 separate 'states' of Idaho and Washington, it 

 occurs to nobody to be an economic waste, as 

 it certainly would if the neighboring boundary 

 line were moved ten miles east or west, there- 

 by throwing them into the same 'State.' 



The location of stations within seventy 

 miles of each other and in the midst of sim- 



