but I sincerely hope that the development of public sentiment will ultimately place in the hands of the Department the necessary means for the successful working out of these vast problems.

Respectfully yours,

W. B. WILSON,
Secretary.

The industrial opportunity of the hour lies in the intensive development of our people. The agency is now at hand, the United States department of labor. What the department of agriculture has done for animals and plants, let the department of labor do for mankind. Constructive economics suggest the lines of effort, first, to give the opportunity to the young to learn how to do things which in later life will increase their incomes, and to discover what is best to do with the increased income-after all knowledge of the problems of the depth of life.

Second-to give the opportunity for those who want work to find work, to remove the narrow conceptions which permit child labor, wages below a minimum standard of living, and to ameliorate the evils of life by old age pensions, compensation for accidents, etc. There are problems of the breadth of life.

Third in the great field of length of life, much may be done and little has been attempted. Here, death and disease play havoc and the awful waste which goes on passes comprehension. The horrors of the European war are no more than a drop in the bucket in comparison with the blood tax of pneumonia and tuberculosis. All relative values are lost sight of in the political realm. Elections succeed elections fought over petty issues-the tariff, the money question, and the thread-bare issues of the past. Completely forgotten are the real vital issues which will bring dividends into every family—a larger earning power, a higher standard of living, and longer and healthier lives. These issues are the issues of tomorrow, and when we who labor, wake, a newer and a finer meaning will lie in those grand old words-the "rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"-words copied by the founders of our government into our fundamental documents,-words which they had snatched red-hot from the philosophy of the French revolution. Not by destruction, like those in Europe who cannot reason together, but by construction and by cöoperation among all classes shall we successfully broaden, deepen and lengthen human life upon this earth.

THE IMPORTANCE OF RESEARCH AS A MEANS OF INCREASING AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION

BY M. B. WAITE,

Pathologist in Charge, Fruit Disease Investigations, United States Department of Agriculture.

The great new feature of the modern progress in agriculture is the rapid increase in the utilization of science and the results of scientific research as a source of information and guidance in improving and perfecting agricultural methods.

Research in agriculture may be divided into two main classes: strictly agricultural research, and scientific research. The first type is concerned primarily with actual methods of growing and utilizing crop plants with animal production, etc. It takes agricultural methods developed empirically and subjects them to critical experimentation. It gathers the methods developed in various parts of the world and tests them out experimentally, under given conditions. It utilizes precepts developed in the sciences, or rather, tests their availability for use in actual practice, by trying them out in the field. It could, however, theoretically, be carried on in part without any help from science. As a matter of fact, at the present time it is becoming more and more influenced by scientific data. All such questions as depth and kind of tillage, varieties of crops to be planted in different localities, kinds of animals to use for certain purposes, depth and distance and time of seeding and planting, varieties suited for different sections and different purposes, rotation of crops, kinds and amounts of fertilizers to use, time and amount of water, when this is artifically applied, and, in fact, the development of all the various routine practices of actual farming come within its scope.

The second type is research in the sciences which have a direct bearing on and are helpful to the development of agriculture and agricultural methods. These sciences are principally chemistry, including physiological chemistry; physics, including soil physics; zoölogy in nearly all its branches, including entomology, animal

physiology and animal pathology; botany in most all its branches, including plant physiology, plant pathology and bacteriology.

Agriculture is so broad in its scope and requirements that it utilizes, in varying degree, and gets help from, nearly all the other arts as well as from the sciences. For example, modern agriculture utilizes, to a very large extent, engineering, architecture, manufacturing and transportation among the useful arts. It also utilizes mathematics, astronomy, meteorology, geography and geology among the sciences in addition to those mentioned above.

It has been observed, by many, that farmers, as a class, are conservative that they hesitate to take up new ideas. This is a natural result of the old-time empirical method. The farmer was compelled to stick to the time-tried methods known to be successful by long experience. Any other course than this was to invite disaster.

Referring, again, to the strictly agricultural research work, no one can accuse the present investigators in this line of being conservative. They are hunting for something new all the time. In fact, they may even be accused, at times, of being too anxious for novelties in methods and of not giving the proper weight to the best empirically developed procedures. These investigators have, at the present time, three possible sources of information in perfecting agricultural routine processes: first, the old line empirical methods; second, the results of tests with growing crops under modern experimental conditions; and third, the data and results available from the different sciences.

We are now ready to answer the question as to why science has only recently come to the aid of agriculture, particularly why chemistry and the biological sciences have been of so little use to the farmer. It seems to me the real reason is very simple. It is because our knowledge of the sciences has been so imperfect and incomplete. No one knows better than the investigating scientist the fragmentary and incomplete nature of our exact knowledge. This is particularly true of the biological sciences. Take botany, for instance; here is a science which deals with plants and with plant life in all its various phases. Why has the science of plants, until recently, been of so little use to the cultivator of plants, and why has this science lately been utilized in so many different ways with such splendid results? It is because the science itself was weak. Only

fragmentary, isolated facts here and there had been worked out; only a few of its principles had been discovered.

Bacteria had been known and described to some extent since the days of Ehrenberg (1830). It remained for Pasteur, in 1862, to prove that they were the real cause and not the result of fermentation. He discovered the first bacterial disease, a silk-worm disease, in 1870. A year or two later, he proved that anthrax of cattle was caused by a bacillus. Burrill, in 1878, discovered that pear blight was caused by bacteria, the first discovery of a bacterial plant disease. Koch discovered the germ of tuberculosis in 1884. Since that time there has been a continual stream of new and important discoveries in bacteriology of immediate and practical benefit to agriculture.

The fungus diseases of plants have been known and described for one hundred and fifty years. The number has been added to continually until it runs up into the thousands. Many single species of both cultivated and native plants have from fifty to one hundred fungus enemies attacking them. Not until Millardet discovered the efficacy of Bordeaux mixture in the control of the vine mildew in 1883 and published his results in 1885 did we have a satisfactory and direct way of killing these fungus enemies or preventing their attacks on the host plant. A new word, "fungicide," had to be added to the dictionary.

One of the effects of the utilization of the various sciences in agriculture has been to bring to notice the gaps in the sciences. The demands of agriculture, therefore, for new knowledge in science have acted as a powerful stimulus to scientific men to take up many problems which might otherwise pass unnoticed. In this way. agriculture has greatly stimulated certain lines of research, such as many problems in chemistry, including physiological chemistry, and many branches of botanical and zoological science, particularly in pathological and bacteriological lines. Agriculture, therefore, has not only drawn heavily on scientific results, but has in turn enormously stimulated intellectual activity in these lines. In a much more direct way, however, it has fostered and encouraged scientific research by financing and supporting it. It is safe to say that there is far more scientific work being done during the current year in botany financed by agricultural appropriation bills than all the other research botanical activity combined, whether amateur

or professional. What we need is more real science. That, I think, soon becomes apparent to all engaged in attacking problems of agricultural production.

Chemistry has done great things for agriculture. It has furnished the methods of fertilizing the soil and of securing these fertilizers from the earth,-potash, phosphoric acid, and nitrogen. It has helped us in compounding a balanced complete fertilizer, varying to suit soil conditions and crops. It taught us how to feed a balanced ration to our stock. It provided simple tests by which the farmer can determine the amount of butter fat in any given sample of milk and thus furnished a guide for distinguishing between productive and unproductive animals. Chemistry, combined with plant-breeding methods, has increased the sugar content of sugar beets by furnishing a method for determining the high sugar content of certain specimens to be used for seed production. It furnishes the basis of much agricultural experimentation and assists in nearly all lines of research.

The science of zoology has contributed much information of use to agriculture. Perhaps in no way has it been more useful than through the researches on the diseases of domestic animals and the methods of controlling or mitigating these diseases. Many of these diseases are not only contagious to the animals, but are doubly serious because communicable to man. Zoological science has furnished the basis for the elaborate system of meat inspection, of dairy inspection, and of quarantine operations. The introduction of the tuberculin test in eliminating tuberculosis from dairy herds may be cited as a fine piece of work. In some animal diseases, such as the foot and mouth disease and swine plague, we are still in the condition of not enough science. In neither of these contagious diseases has the germ or the real cause of contagion been discovered. Mendel's law and the principles of animal breeding worked out scientifically have given an entirely new status to this art. Results can be figured out scientifically by mathematical and biological rules and a prediction made beforehand as to what may be expected from certain crosses.

The science of entomology has been of the utmost utility to farmers in crop production in recent years. Economic entomology may be said to date back for at least two generations. The control of insect pests is perhaps one of the greatest contributions of science