New YORK AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. hy ¢ 
What place has the experiment station in this educational 
work? There seems to be a general expectation on the part of 
the public that an experiment station is to participate in all forms 
of agricultural teaching outside of school or college instruction. 
There exists a widespread and insistent public demand that 
members of the Station Staff engage in the various forms of ex- 
tension teaching at institutes, from the convention platform, by 
means of literature and as a correspondence bureau, a demand 
which constitutes a real and perplexing problem for those who are 
attempting investigation of agricultural problems in a way that 
requires concentration and continuity of effort. 
The work of an experiment station relates primarily to the 
acquisition of knowledge rather than to its dissemination. All 
teaching, whether academic or popular, indeed, all farm practice, 
must rest upon a body of knowledge that should be scientific and 
reliable, which it is the function of an experiment station to en- 
large. Agriculture now suffers from the limitations of knowl- 
edge as well as from so-called science that is utterly unreliable, 
and no more essential or useful service can be rendered to the 
farmer and to the public in general than the discovery of new 
truth that makes possible greater efficiency and economy in farm 
management. Inquiry must precede instruction of all forms, 
from the college class room to educational efforts of the most 
popular kind, and it is a serious mistake to so dissipate the 
energies of agricultural investigators as to render them inefficient 
in the peculiar field to which they are assigned. 
In 1907 the Association of American Agricultural Colleges 
and Experiment Stations appointed a commission to consider and 
report on the conditions that should surround the effort at agri- 
cultural research in the United States. This Commission found 
that a large amount of publicity work had been required of those 
persons holding positions of scientific responsibility in agricul- 
tural colleges and experiment stations, thereby greatly minimiz- 
ing the efficiency of the agencies that are established for agricul- 
