THE 



TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST 



AND 



MAGAZINE OF THE 



CEYLON AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



Vol. XXXVII, COLOMBO, NOVEMBEE 15th, 1911, No. 5. 



AGRICULTURE AND SCIENTIFIC 

 RESEARCH. 



The old country has at last awakened 

 to some purpose to the desirability of 

 encouraging scientific research in con- 

 nection with agriculture, realising, as 

 Canada, Germany, the United States, 

 and other countries have realised, that 

 without progress in the pure sciences 

 that underlie agriculture, progress in 

 agriculture itself must be slow and 

 halting. To leave agriculture to depend 

 upon the general progress of the under, 

 lying sciences is by no means the best 

 way ; to provide those sciences with 

 funds and demand special progress in 

 directions that bear upon agriculture is 

 better. And this is what is being done, 

 as will be seen by a perusal of the 

 extract from the Times given below. 



What the general public, however, 

 requires to learn is that scientific 

 research is slow, and that results must 

 not be expected in a few weeks or 

 months. This has been the great fault 

 in the work of a good many Depart- 

 ments of Agriculture, results being 

 hurriedly produced, only to find that 

 they require complete revision or 

 modification in a few years. The experi- 

 ments carried on at Peradeniya with 

 the manuring of Cacao, the results 

 of which will be published almost at 

 once if they are not actually out when 



this appears, afford a very good case 

 in point. Had we published them some 

 years ago, many meanings might have 

 been put into them which fuller ex- 

 perience shows them incompetent to 

 bear. In this connection we may with 

 advantage quote the presidential 

 address to the agricultural section of 

 the British Association, given a short 

 time ago by Mr. W. Bateson. 



Agricultural Section. 

 In his address to the agricultural 

 sub-section, Mr. W. Bateson, before 

 dealing with the physiological, patho- 

 logical and genetic aspects, emphasised 

 the wide scope of the applied science of 

 agriculture. He did this in view of the 

 present very remarkable outburst of 

 activity in the promotion of science 

 in its application to agricultuie, 

 particularly with the provision on a 

 considerable scale in England for the 

 first time of a national subsidy in the 

 form of the Development Grant, He 

 pointed out the danger of requiring the 

 issue, as was done under a similar 

 scheme in the United States, of periodi- 

 cal bulletins or reports of progress. If 

 it were true that the public really 

 demanded continual scraps of results, 

 and could not trust the investigators 

 to pursue research in a reasonable way, 

 then the public should be plainly given 

 to understand that the time for 



