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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLII. No. 1085 



bothe in tongues and sciences at home and in 

 vniuersities, to the adournyng of the common 

 welthe, better seruice of their kyng, & great pleas- 

 ure and commodite of their own selues, to what 

 kinde of life so euer they shold applie them. 

 Therfore whatsoeuer senee that tyme I minded to 

 write, I wrate y° same either in greke or latine. 



In this quaint phraseology of three centuries 

 and more ago are stated the fundamental rea- 

 sons why experiment station workers of to-day 

 will do well to publish the major portion of 

 the purely scientific results of their labors not 

 in bulletins, but in established scientific jour- 

 nals. Point for point, the reasons why learned 

 men should publish their best technical results 

 in the best technical manner were precisely the 

 same in the sixteenth century as they are now 

 in the twentieth. Let us see : The " comoditie " 

 of the station bulletin very rarely indeed passes 

 the compass of America, and consequently fails 

 to get the attention of the European workers 

 in the same field. Secondly, the labors taken 

 in the carrying out of a piece of investigation 

 are indeed more than " half e loste " if the re- 

 sults are published in a bulletin which chiefly 

 comes to the attention of the farmer, who cer- 

 tainly " settes not by learnyng," in the sense 

 that he is in no wise interested in the techni- 

 calities of science. 



The third point is one about which we can 

 not perhaps expect full agreement, but as 

 honest differences of opinion can do no harm, 

 let me state clearly as my own conviction, that 

 our friend Ivaye is right in his assertion that 

 good work is harmed, and the cause for whichi 

 it stands is harmed, by so publishing it as to 

 invite the unintelligent criticism of unin- 

 formed people. This is exactly what we do 

 whenever we publish technical scientific mate- 

 rial in bulletins distributed to the general 

 farming public. In spite of the somewhat 

 rabid admonishings which were directed to- 

 wards the writer when he made the same 

 statement once before, he ventures now to re- 

 iterate that the general agricultural public is, 

 as a class, totally incapable of forming any 

 just opinion of the meaning or value of the 

 technical details of scientific work. To invite 

 them to form and express such opinion merely 

 calls down upon the station and the author 



ridicule or worse. For those, if there be any 

 such still, whose democracy is so intense as 

 to lead them to the conviction that there are 

 no differences between men, and that the 

 humblest hired man on the farm is the intel- 

 lectual peer of a Newton or a Darwin, the 

 above will sound undemocratic. It really is 

 not. To preserve peace in the family^ I am 

 willing to admit that perhaps we might all be 

 Newtons had we been subjected to the same 

 environment. My only point is that, whether 

 because of heredity or environment, in real fact 

 we are not aU JSTewtons. A page of Sanskrit is, 

 I very much regret to say, totally incompre- 

 hensible to me. There are many pages of many 

 bulletins which have been issued by American 

 experiment stations which are totally incom- 

 prehensible to most farmers. May we not, then, 

 without calling each other names like " cod- 

 fish aristocrat," let the matter rest here, and 

 turn to Cajus's fourth point? That point, 

 taken over into our present " universe of dis- 

 course," is that since a great deal about agri- 

 culture that is purely practical, not scientific 

 in any sense, and of an entirely ephemeral na- 

 ture, has been and is continually published in 

 bulletin form, it can only work to the hurt of 

 first-class research work, such as nearly every 

 one of our stations is producing, to publish' it 

 in bibliographical community with the trivial 

 matter which composes so great a part of bul- 

 letin literature as a class. Literary and scien- 

 tific productions, as well as men, are judged 

 by the company they keep. 



The fifth and the " chiefe " reason why the 

 stations should publish more of their research 

 work in journals rather than bulletins is be- 

 cause of the educational value of that method 

 for the station men themselves. If a piece of 

 work is submitted to a technical journal for 

 publication, that work must pass a test of merit 

 which is entirely independent of station pol- 

 itics, executive favoritism, the marital con- 

 nections of the author, the probable effect on 

 the constituency and next year's appropriation, 

 and a host of other things which have been 

 known to play a part in bulletin publication. 

 The work will be judged by the editorial board 

 2 But only for that reason! 



