Despite Norton's admiration for the Association as a commendable institution for the conduct of research, Professor Johnston voiced increasing dissatisfaction as he encountered bothersome disadvantages in the operation of the Association's program. He uncomplainingly carried out his agreement to pay from his own pocket the expenses of providing a laboratory, apparatus, materials, and assistants during a trial period of 5 years. As the demands from the subscribers rapidly mounted, however, for chemical analyses, for diagnostic reports on farming problems, and for personal visits by the lecturing chemist to various communities, Johnston had difficulty finding sufficient time and energy for doing in the laboratory the type of experimenting that he considered essential. In practice, therefore, he found small solace in the original understanding with the framers of the Association's constitution that the chemist primarily should search for "general principles" via basic research, and not be placed at the beck and call of subscribers demanding personal services.

Johnston noted, furthermore, a popular tendency among the members of the Association to consider the field trials more important than the laboratory work. This attitude not only forecast doom to the chemical experimentation unconnected with field trials, but also interfered with the analytical testing required in the conduct of the trials to make them worthwhile. Moreover, Johnston lost confidence in the farmer's ability to conduct home trials. Only the "professional experimenters" could properly do the accurate work necessary, he concluded, and they should, for the best results, devote their skills to small trial gardens near the laboratory site, thus avoiding a legion of inaccuracies involved in experiments on farm fields (13).

Johnston grew more disturbed as gradually he came to realize that his "constituency" failed to understand or sympathize with the researcher's attitude toward science. The subscribers overconfidently expected that the chemist, once employed, would very shortly make discoveries that would line their pockets with gold. When their great expectations failed, their disappointment made them discredit science as a helpful tool for their farming (14, p. 197). The Scotsman's concern became graver upon his discovery that Association members did not appreciate the time-consuming and exacting nature of meaningful research. Impatient for immediate results, the farmers exerted an "amount of pressure" which the chemist found “unfavourable, in a high degree" because it urged him to issue premature announcements based on insufficient investigations. An unwillingness on the part of the constituency to wait patiently for scientific discoveries would, Johnston estimated, prevent any real advance in applying science to agriculture (13).

RESEARCH OUTLOOK BROADENED

What would be the proper administrative setting, the professor pondered, for an agricultural research laboratory? To operate efficiently, he came to believe, the institution should not be amalgamated with an agricultural society: instead it should be organized under a board of managers functioning solely for the conduct of research.

Would such a research agency operate satisfactorily if attached to an agricultural college? The Durham professor did not directly

answer this question but he denied that a collegiate setting would be ideal (13):

But who is to undertake the numerous inquiries I have already named? At whose expense? When can they be begun? Some may think that they lie within the province of an agricultural college . . . But the proper business of a college is to teach-not to investigate: to diffuse existing knowledge the first-to enlarge that knowledge only the second consideration.

Thus, as Johnston searched for an environment where the subsidized researcher could concentrate single-mindedly on his research objectives, he questioned the advisability of the collegiate connection_for the same reason that he objected to the agricultural society. The research function could not compete favorably with other interests in a popularity contest, and it would suffer accordingly. In 1848 he retired from the chemist's post as the Association neared the termination of its 5-year period of trial. Thereupon the Highland and Agricultural Society permitted the Association to dissolve (8).

How closely did Norton follow Johnston's pioneering; how much did he benefit from the Scottish experience? Beneath his new ambition to be a professional agricultural chemist there lay an earlier, yet persistent, determination to establish a first-class school for instructing practical farmers in scientific agriculture.

His quest for an agricultural education constantly reminded him of the need for and the absence of such training in the United States. Although fully aware of the potential for research intrinsic in the Chemistry Association, he tended to regard the Scottish laboratory as a promising agency, if transplanted to American soil, for demonstrating the value of applying chemistry to farming. The Association appealed to him, in short, more for its immediate usefulness as a school for farmers than for its eventual capacity as a research unit.

Repeatedly during his stay in Scotland he marveled at the success of Johnston's educational labors in stimulating practical farmers to accept science and to improve their farming. If an American laboratory with a built-in teaching mission could be established in the United States, would not it arouse an American movement for scientific agriculture in the same way that the Association had encouraged the Scots? With this inspiration Norton's interest veered away from research toward the education of the American farmer as a primary objective.

Searching from afar for a glow of American farmer interest in science as a tool for improvement, Norton sensed its presence in the emerging movement to establish agricultural colleges. Before leaving Scotland he persuaded himself that each of the projected colleges should include "a branch for the pursuit of chemistry as connected with agriculture, and for the dissemination of knowledge on that subject" (18). Convinced that the chemical unit as well as the college aimed to teach the farmer, he believed, contrary to Johnston's view, that the two institutions would produce a convenient and compatible combination.

YALE SET UP LABORATORY

Returning to Connecticut in 1846, Norton confided to the Sillimans his plans for founding a laboratory-school. The elder Silliman induced the Yale Corporation to create two self-supporting professor

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ships one for Norton in Agricultural Chemistry and Vegetable and Animal Physiology, the other for Silliman, Jr., in Practical Chemistry. In 1847 the Yale Corporation created a Department of Philosophy and the Arts, a framework within which Norton and his associate, "Young Ben❞ Silliman, were enabled to organize on the Yale Campus their School of Applied Chemistry (2). To accomplish the school's educational objective, the partners set up a course of laboratory work for students wishing to study pure science, applied science, or techniques of teaching. To pay for the upkeep of the Analytical Laboratory, they announced their readiness to conduct all kinds of commercial analyses.

As supervisor of the school's agricultural program, Norton selected for imitation a cluster of features from his Scottish experience. Specializing in soil analysis, that part of the Edinburg laboratory's work which had attained the greatest popularity with the Scottish farmers, he encouraged farmers to submit samples of their soils and fertilizers. To each sample-sender he penned a report of the analyst's findings and priced his services according to the time, labor, and materials used in the analysis.

Early in 1848 he went beyond the Johnstonian precedent when he introduced a 2 months' course of lectures, designed especially for practicing farmers and based on Johnston's texts (19). To the professional farmer he directed the course's theme: Understand the relationship between science and farming and unite theory with practice. Thus, winter lectures for practical farmers, commercial analyses of substances important in the farmers' business, and laboratory instruction to prospective agricultural chemists comprised Norton's version of a competent agricultural school.

NORTON PROMOTED AGRICULTURAL COLLEGES

Once started, however, on a program of administering an infant school and shaping a proper curriculum, Norton soon became engrossed in the widening movement to establish State agricultural colleges. In 1850 he announced a plan calling for primary, secondary, and collegiate instruction in agricultural science and proposing that public and private schools in each State cooperate to provide an integrated course of study. At the top of his three-level system he placed "one grand central State institution, and Agricultural College," equipped with an experimental farm and staffed by professors well trained in science (20, p. 18). The graduates of the college, he urged, should form the faculties of numerous private academies and normal schools, which in turn should train teachers for primary schools. No longer did he intend to reach only the mature, practicing farmer with parttime education via the Analytical Laboratory; now he proposed to concentrate on undergraduate students in a scientific curriculum and a degree program.

Familiar with the varied proposals preached by the enthusiasts for farm schools, Norton became disturbed because the plans made no clearcut provision for the conduct of research. Such provision he believed essential if the college were to be the source of scientific knowledge for the entire State.

Emphatically he warned that the projected heavy schedules of teaching and administration would smother a research program. He

advocated that college authorities adopt a positive method for the accomplishment of research projects.

"There should be every facility for original research, and experiment," he said (20), "so that this might not only be a great centre for instruction, but afford also a rich harvest of discoveries, whereby science should be advanced in every direction."

His plea that a chemist whose sole responsibility would be research should be appointed to the college staffs brought into the open a difficulty which Johnston had continually faced: the competition between research and nonresearch activities for the scientist's time. By guaranteeing his "branch for the pursuit of chemistry as connected with agriculture" a secure place within the collegiate structure, Norton attempted to eliminate an incipient conflict between teaching and research. For teaching, he contended, appoint a full-time teacher; for research, appoint a full-time researcher. This conclusion seemed to provide a solution to the problem which the Chemistry Association had only partially solved.

The problem of securing endowment funds from a State treasury for putting a college into operation, however, worried Norton and other planners far more than did that of reaching a decision regarding the relative roles of teaching versus research. The rural majorities in the State legislatures of New England repeatedly rejected bills granting stipends for founding an agricultural college. The legislative refusals deeply disappointed Norton because they revealed to him the presence of a deep-seated belief among farmers that scientists could not make a useful contribution to farm improvement (21). Attributing the farmers' attitude to the home-style education the average farmer had received, Norton described that manual labor system as "a species of close corporation, which attaches men to old habits, renders them jealous of innovations, and does not encourage independent thought" (20, p. 7).

He might explain rural conservatism but he could not overcome it. Farmers trained at home not only believed their own educational experience to be the best possible preparation for farming, but they also resisted every attempt to change the system. They especially opposed the efforts of educators to introduce schemes that required boys to leave home and learn farming in schools. They denounced book farming, and Norton could return their fire only by advocating more book farming. Thus the professor faced a problem having no immediate solution. In order to combat conservatism he first had to change the educational system; but to change the system he first had to conquer conservatism.

Norton could see no escape from the predicament. He resigned hope of introducing a system of scientific agriculture into New England. He turned instead to New York State, a "newer country" where farmers perhaps might appreciate the advice of scientists, and in 1851 put his willpower and his overtaxed physique into a movement for a State university there (22). That campaign halted his missionary work; he encountered a frustration more decisive than discouragement and disillusionment: death in 1852 at the age of 30.

When death ended Norton's career, did it also end Norton's influence? He died 5 years before Michigan founded the Nation's first agricultural college, and 10 years before the Federal Government approved the Morrill Land Grant College Act. He did not live to

witness the difficulties that the administrators and the teachers in the forthcoming institutions experienced as they struggled in later decades to make their agricultural colleges popular. Yet during his shortlived career he collided with the same set of serious issues that persistently would vex them. In his training and his thinking about the conduct of research, Norton traveled to the doorstep of the idea of the college-connected experiment station, in function if not in name. Norton's unfulfilled ambitions for establishing an agricultural college and an agency for agricultural experimentation became the property of his small band of students in the Yale Analytical Laboratory. One of these enthusiasts, Samuel William Johnson, dedicated his career, for the remainder of the century, to finding a solution to the difficulties obstructing the creation and the successful operation of an institution for scientific investigation in agriculture.

GERMAN EXPERIMENT STATION MOVEMENT

Samuel W. Johnson spent a lifetime searching for the most effective ways to institutionalize research in agriculture. Entering the Analytical Laboratory in 1850, he absorbed Professor Norton's ideas and enthusiasm. Later he studied science in German laboratories and personally observed the German experiment station movement in its infancy. He became America's first advocate calling for a similar movement in the United States.

"There have been lately established in Germany" he wrote in 1855 (11, p. 80), "especially in Saxony, a number of so-called Experiment Stations, or experimental farms, with laboratories in connection, for the exclusive object of promoting scientific agriculture. These are intended to make science practical, and practice scientific, and no agency can be desired better adapted for these important purposes." Support for Johnson's concept of an agricultural experiment station came from many of the young men, once students of Norton and Johnson at New Haven, who subsequently became leaders in the landgrant agricultural college movement. Johnson's first success in his ardent advocacy is reflected in the establishment in 1876 of America's pioneer experiment station-The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station.

More earnestly and persistently than any other scientist during the latter half of the 19th century, Johnson developed and publicized the standards which in his judgment ought to prevail permanently in the organization and the operation of a center for agricultural research. From his student days in the 1850's to his directorship at New Haven after 1877, Johnson steadily elaborated his concept of the proper administrative setting for the conduct of significant research. His thinking during this period produced America's first example of a regularly organized station, one chartered and financed by the State legislature for the sole purpose of investigation and experiment.

In 1851, after he had become Norton's chief analyst, Samuel Johnson detected, as Norton had done previously under Johnston in Edinburgh, misrepresentations on the part of some fertilizer people. After Norton's death Johnson resolved to check false claims by using fearlessly in the public interest the analytical techniques he had mastered. Analyzing and comparing samples he had collected in market channels, he published his findings in 1853 in a farm magazine whose cru