530 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXII. No. 82.5 



number that actually carry out the work 

 in a manner sufficiently effective to demon- 

 strate the worth of the method. 



Every man of normal mind honestly 

 wishes the welfare of his race, and his na- 

 tion in particular. It is nevertheless ap- 

 parent that great difficulties must of neces- 

 sity beset any attempt on the part of the 

 state or the nation to conserve any one of 

 its natural resources ; for after all has been 

 said, conservation is a biological problem. 

 It is essentially impossible for the individ- 

 ual to actually place the nation or society 

 at large as first in importance as against 

 the actual and apparent necessities of self 

 and family. It is all the more difficult be- 

 cause it is hard, because of the lack of 

 facts, for the individual man to clearly dis- 

 tinguish actual necessities of individual 

 and family life from apparent necessities 

 and the actually necessary steps in work 

 from the useless. Thus the collective de- 

 sires of society for conservation must al- 

 ways meet strong opposition from individ- 

 uals and classes of individuals. Any 

 attempts to solve any of the great problems 

 of the conservation or handling of re- 

 sources which are possible of rapid devel- 

 opment and exploitation, as, for example, 

 the productivity of the new lands, meet 

 with the difficulties which bear down on 

 the individual and often even arouse an- 

 tagonisms which are social and political. 



Every one seems willing to conserve any- 

 thing save only that upon which his daily 

 bread and immediate future to him seems 

 most to rest. The needs of the individual 

 and of the family are real and important. 

 Those of society and the nation are more 

 indistinctly real to the individual, though 

 they are none the less real and eternally 

 necessary to society. 



The individual longs for health, but, 

 when diseased with an infectious disease, is 

 apt to rebel when placed under the restric- 



tions of quarantine, for that, in part, les- 

 sens or curtails his hope of gaining an im- 

 mediate livelihood for himself and family. 

 The farmer places his available funds and 

 labors into new lands, which to him repre- 

 sent his immediate source of supplies, and 

 instinctively must exert every effort to ex- 

 ploit and develop those resources upon 

 which he depends in what to him appears 

 to be the most effective manner to serve his 

 immediate wants. Thus arises the desire 

 to crop rapidly and largely, if not well. 

 This view of the case, considered calmly, is 

 very apt to place each of us in a better 

 attitude towards helping the individual 

 farmer in his struggle with cropping con- 

 ditions. It is easy to say, "Oh, the farmers 

 are an ignorant lot. " " They sow one crop 

 continually on the same land." "They do 

 not rotate." "They do not make proper 

 use of available fertilizers, suitable for 

 plant growth," etc., but there are few mem- 

 bers of this congress who do not realize 

 that the science of cropping is not yet a 

 very definite one, and if it were, and we 

 should expect each farmer to understand it 

 for the five or six necessary crops to be 

 grown on his land, that we are asking him 

 to understand principles of far more deli- 

 cate and scientific nature than could now 

 be expected of the lawyer, doctor, banker 

 or other professional man. 



We must also realize that many theories 

 of agriculture which are by us recognized 

 as correct in principle quite often fail to 

 give results in practise. It thus behooves 

 us as investigators to search for details 

 which will explain many of the contradic- 

 tory results obtained in our general crop- 

 ping methods. That the methods of the 

 individual farmer are quite generally op- 

 posed to the real needs of society, and are 

 often greatly to his own disadvantage, I 

 believe gives the real foundation for the 

 true doctrines of soil conservation and 



