THE AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENTAL STATION.

New Zealand Journal of Agriculture, Volume VI, Issue 5, 15 May 1913, Page 505

THE AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENTAL STATION.

ITS TRUE OBJECTIVE.

“ A scientific laboratory in the fullest and purest sense, given over to varied but purely scientific work, with fields and barns and herds ranking with microscope, balance, and burette as mere implements of research. It is experimental only so far as it may test, on a strictly laboratory scale, the suggestions of research. It is the investigative department' of the college to which it may be attached, and, as such, may be called upon only to furnish new truths to be taught in the class-room and the laboratory, in the extension lecture, and on the demonstration farm. With this distinctive and restricted purpose the field of its operation is yet ample and sufficient.

" The acquisition of knowledge must precede its application, and further real progress in agriculture must, therefore, come not so much from improved instruction in the schools, from increase in our extension teaching, or from demonstration in the field, valuable and ‘important as these may be, but mainly from research in the station laboratory.

" And yet a greater service may the station render to the State. Among all the public institutions, it should stand pre-eminently to illustrate the persistent, untiring search for truth. . . . For it is the search after truth that is the basis of moral training, and it is the profession of truth that alone shall make us free.”— H. C. White, in an address on the American Experiment Stations.