Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/367

Rh gives the most practical final result. As a rule, the older stations also have the most experienced and best-known agricultural scientists in their employ; but this is not always the case. With the large increase in the number of experiment stations which took place in 1887-'88 came a corresponding demand for the services of these experienced men, and several accepted more lucrative positions than they had previously held.

The demand for experienced men was, however, far in excess of the supply. From seventeen the number of experiment stations suddenly increased to fifty, with nothing like a proportional increase in men who were capable at the outset of filling the places to which they were appointed. At first, many places were undoubtedly filled by popular favorites, appointed to their positions through the influence of farmers' organizations or for wholly local reasons. Some of these have proved worthy of the trust and by hard study and work are building up their departments and themselves.

But the lack of suitable men has not been the only drawback to the work of the younger stations. Two clauses in the act passed by Congress allowing only three thousand dollars of the first and seven hundred and fifty dollars of each succeeding appropriation to be used for buildings and requiring that from the very first at least four bulletins a year be issued, while ultimately it may prove of advantage to them, has certainly tended at first to bring them no praise. It was supposed that the States would furnish buildings, but unfortunately some of them furnished either inadequate ones or none at all, and in one or two instances even the annual appropriation which the State had previously given to the agricultural college was abolished. The fact that quarterly bulletins were required by law, whether the station had valuable matter on hand or not, coupled with the fact that in many instances men wholly new to the business had to write them, tended at first to distribute more or less matter of questionable value. As the bulletins have general circulation among the class for which they were intended only in the State in which they were issued, many States necessarily sent out some compilations on the same topics which, to all practical purposes, were duplicates of each other. Bulletins, too, had to be written in popular style, in order that they might be understood by men whose education, in too many instances, had been limited to the winter district school. If it be also remembered that these newly formed stations have been organized scarcely three years and have not been in working order for that length of time; that they are going through the same trials as the older stations have had; that they have to break down the prejudices of many farmers, as the older stations have largely done; and that they were popularly expected to show in a few