New York AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. 13 
quality and quantity with almost every variation and modification, 
soil temperatures at different depths and during different seasons, 
drainage waters, their composition and flow, and fertilizer control ; 
and in this country during the past twenty years the effect of this 
control has been to increase the average intrinsic value of com- 
mercial fertilizers thirty-one per cent. The average cost has 
decreased during the same period fifty per cent; or in other words 
the average saving amounts to 61.48 per cent, 7. e., to-day one may 
purchase the same amount of fertilizing material for $38.57 which 
would have cost him $100 twenty years ago. 
You will please observe that this annual saving to the people of 
this State in this single matter of fertilizers many times repays the 
expense of your Station since its establishment, and this is a matter 
easily estimated in dollars and cents; but no intelligent person can 
doubt that greater pecuniary results have proceeded from these 
experiment stations than even this, and many greater results are 
yet to follow. | 
The average acreage yield inthe farm crops of England Hee been 
more than doubled within twenty-five years; the same may be 
done in New York; the average yield of many dairy herds, in this 
State and others, has been more than doubled within twenty-five 
years; the same may be true of our million and a half of dairy 
cattle in this State. 
You will observe, also, that in the list of investigations pursued 
at these several Stations to which I have referred, you will find 
everything which has occupied the attention of your Station for 
the past six years. Whatever of criticism may be directed against 
the work of your Station therefore may be brought against those 
who have spent their lives in their effort to advance our knowl- 
edge of the fundamental principles of agricultural science, and if 
there are such critics we may say of them and their criticisms 
that “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” 
_AsI said at the outset, I wish, in all I have said, to be counted 
as an outsider and an expert, called in to pass judgment upon the 
work of your Station in the past. I can not too highly commend 
the comprehensive wisdom of the statute which established your 
“Station “for the purpose,” as it states, “of promoting oa branch 
of agriculture by scientific investigation and experiment.” Mark the 
words. Fora century hence no better law could be framed for such 
_apurpose. I can not too highly commend the intelligence, faith- 
