August 12, 1896.] 



Garden and Forest. 



321 



GARDEN AND FOREST. 



PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY 



THE GARDEN AND FOREST PUBLISHING CO. 



Office: Tribune Building, New York. 



Conducted by Professor C. S. Sargent. 



ENTERED AS SECOND-CLASS MATTER AT THE POST-OFFICE AT NEW YORK, N. Y. 



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 12, 1S96. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



Editorial Articles : — The Proper Work of Experiment Stations 321 



Formal Gardens 322 



Waste Planting in Illinois Professor Charles A. Kejfier. 322 



A Botanical Journey through New Mexico. — I E. N. Plank. 322 



Foreign Correspondence : — London Letter IV. Watson. 323 



New or Little-known Plants: — Clematis Addisonii. (With figure.) 324 



Cultural Department :— Roses J. N. Gerard. 326 



Preparing for Winter Flowers T. D. Hatfield. 326 



Achimenes G. IV. Oliver. 327 



Some Novelties.— I E. O. Orpet. 32; 



Correspondence :— An Interesting Sport H. G. Pratt. 328 



From the Missouri Botanic Garden Fanny Copley Seavey. 32S 



The Water-garden at Willow Grove IV. Tricker. 328 



The Forest : — The Burma Teak Forests. — II Sir Dietrich Brandis. 329 



Notes 33° 



Illustration : — Clematis Addisonii, Fig. 43 325 



The Proper Work of Experiment Stations. 



IT is only twenty years since the establishment of our 

 first state agricultural experiment station, and now 

 there are more than fifty of them, manned by nearly six 

 hundred persons, and costing a million dollars a year. This 

 implies a substantial taxation of the whole people in the 

 interest of the farmer, but it is only one part of a system 

 which has been organized for his instruction. Besides the 

 various land-grant colleges, the shorter agricultural courses 

 in most of them, the farmers' institutes and migratory dairy 

 schools, there are boards of agriculture with paid secre- 

 taries, and exhibitions of crude and manufactured products, 

 all of which, together with the agricultural and scientific 

 press, are endeavoring in one way or another to instruct 

 the farmer in scientific truth, or in manual practice. 



The resultant of all these educational forces will, of 

 course, be most beneficent when they are properly corre- 

 lated — that is, when all together provide the most compre- 

 hensive instruction, and when each is doing what it is best 

 fitted to accomplish. Now, what shall be the specific place 

 of the experiment station in this scheme? Very plainly, the 

 basis of the whole structure should be accurate scientific 

 knowledge. There is abundant room tor the so-called prac- 

 tical man to report the results of his work. But, after all, the 

 one thing most difficult to discover, and the one thing most 

 useful to know, is the laws and facts — that is, the pure 

 science — which is to be found at the root of all successful 

 practice. The stations are supposed to be officered by men 

 who have the training and temper which fit them to do 

 this work. They constitute a body of skilled investigators 

 who have opportunities and equipment for this work which 

 no one else possesses to such a degree. It would seem 

 clear, then, that the more closely the stations adhere to the 

 primary purpose for which they were created the more 

 thoroughly they will do their part in this complex system. 



We have lately read two papers which, from different 

 standpoints, give support to this view. One of these, enti- 

 tled "Permanent Elements in Experiment Station Work," 

 was read by Dr. A. C. True, before the Association of Agri- 

 cultural Colleges and Experiment Stations ; and the other, 

 entitled " Conservatism in Scientific Agriculture," by Dr.W. II. 

 Jordan, at Trenton, New Jersey. Dr.True's paper is primarily 



a protest against the shifty methods of appointment and 

 administration as now practiced, and a plea for a perma- 

 nent tenure of office among the station workers, without 

 which there can be no unity and continuity of purpose, 

 and no esprit de corps, to insure loyalty and enthusiasm. 

 Dr. True added, and he might have added with greater 

 emphasis, that a permanent staff, or at least a well defined 

 and persistent administrative purpose, is needed because 

 the most important investigations of the station are those 

 which must be carried on over long periods of time. 

 Of course, all this work must be executed with faith- 

 fulness and the results recorded with accuracy, but the 

 final answer to the tests which are made may not be 

 given for years ; and it is this patient waiting, this refusal 

 to adopt what is partial and temporary as finally 

 and entirely true, which gives experimental work its gen- 

 uine value. The individual farmer cannot prosecute 

 investigations of this sort ; neither can societies which 

 are made up of practical farmers and gardeners. They 

 can only be conducted by persons who are devoted 

 to this line of work exclusively. And this means that the 

 best and most effective work of the stations will be the 

 study of principles which may take years to establish. 



Dr. Jordan goes a step farther. He admits that it is a 

 true function of a station to show in what way existing 

 knowledge may be utilized by experiments which serve as 

 object-lessons. He might have added that wherever prin- 

 ciples are known and established it is the proper func- 

 tion of the station to publish them as widely and reiterate 

 them in as many ways as possible, so long as real knowl- 

 edge is disseminated. But he states truly that some of the 

 conclusions published by the stations on the basis of hasty 

 tests will find no place in the permanent records of scien- 

 tific progress except as warnings. The people who pay for 

 this work are impatient to see something for their money, 

 and they drive the stations to field trials of fertilizers, to 

 experiments in feeding animals, conducted so loosely and 

 hastily that no safe conclusions are possible. This means 

 that there should be less haste in promulgating conclusions 

 which have not been reached by a rigid inquiry. It means 

 that the stations shall not be nervously anxious to show some 

 immediate and apparently practical results when they ought 

 to be making more severe scientific investigation. Such in- 

 efficient station work is negatively bad, because it is done 

 at the sacrifice of time and opportunity which are needed 

 to search out the fundamental truths of pure science, and 

 it is positively bad, because wrong teachings mean delay 

 and disaster in agricultural practice. The people are 

 blameworthy for much of the crude station work, because 

 they are impatient while their teachers are making what 

 seems to be slow progress in solving nature's problems. 

 It is true, as Dr. Jordan states, that the work which lives 

 longest and exerts the greatest influence upon the art of 

 agriculture is of that purely scientific kind that is carried 

 on with infinite" pains in the laboratory by men who do not 

 themselves appreciate what will be the far-reaching influ- 

 ence of their labor. 



The stations in this country have already done an inesti- 

 mable amount of good for agriculture in helping the farmer 

 to repel the attacks of insects and of diseases which injure 

 his crops, in improving the quality of his fertilizers and 

 foods, and in many other directions, and when we remem- 

 ber how few men there are in the country who are com- 

 petent to make experiments and deduce from them scien- 

 tific principles, it is more than surprising that they have 

 accomplished as much good as they have. Every year, 

 however, it should be less difficult to secure an efficient 

 staff, and every year there is less excuse lor wasting time 

 with inconsequential plat trials with fertilizers, or com- 

 parative tests with peas and strawberries. That the stations 

 have done as well as they have is due to the fact thai : 

 have so generally adhered to the strict line of scientific 

 work. The more closely they confine themselves to work 

 of this sort, the more certainly the results they achieve 

 will educate the farmers of the country up to the belief 



