One of the first devices for measuring respiratory quotient and body heat losses on large animals was developed before 1900 by the Pennsylvania Experiment Station. Called the Armsby respiration calorimeter, it was named after Dr. Henry P. Armsby, one of the pioneers in scientific nutrition work.

This 1945 photo shows Dr. Selman A. Waksman, New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station, holding a culture of the organism that produces streptomycin, which he and his associates discovered in 1943, as a result of their work with soil micro-organisms.

The national conventions called by Commissioner Loring in 1882 and 1883 opened a new opportunity for land-grant presidents and professors. The sessions enabled the delegates not only to discuss problems in teaching and research but also to perceive the value of meeting regularly for transacting business. No figure at these conventions showed greater skill in winning a position on key committees than President George W. Atherton of the Pennsylvania State College; likewise none worked more determinedly and promptly than he to make land-grant conventions an annual event. Until 1885, however, the power to convene land-grant delegates under Departmental auspices remained in practice with Commissioner Loring, who declined to circulate a call in 1884. The exercise of the convening power passed to land-grant organizers in 1885 when the new Commissioner, Norman Colman, presented unexampled encouragement by inviting delegates from the agricultural colleges and experiment stations to meet in Washington, D.C.

Commissioner Colman granted to the delegates the authority to take action on three pertinent topics: (1) Cooperation between the colleges and the Department; (2) establishment of experiment stations; (3) uniformity in methods of experimenting.

The Colman call did not direct the business of the convention toward college problems, apart from the college and station relationship to the Department and to Congress, except in one incidental passage. "Many other cognate questions," Colman wrote (6), "will suggest themselves." His emphasis on the subject of research did not mean that he did not sympathize with the college educators. On the contrary, as a trustee of the Missouri State College, Colman well knew the exasperating difficulties facing the college presidents in their earnest efforts to popularize the agricultural curricula. Precisely because their difficulties troubled him, Colman offered his help to college officials, and insisted that the convention find ways to institutionalize research activity as effectively as possible. Colman urged, in short, that the colleges make the conduct of research their indelible and identifying characteristic. For this reason he attempted in his welcoming address to fix the attention of the convention on experimentation. "In my judgment," he remarked for the particular benefit of the presidents assembled, "there is nothing which will attract and rivet the attention of the great agricultural public to our agricultural colleges so much as experimental work."

The discussions at the convention did not proceed single-mindedly; nevertheless, on the subject that Colman recommended, namely the administration of research, Professor Seaman A. Knapp, impatient because presidential spokesmen on the first day steered attention away from the problems of research to those of teaching, pinpointed the topic deserving treatment. "How can we practically cooperate," he asked (6, p. 66), "with the Department of Agriculture in carrying on this experimental work?" President Atherton, however, promptly denied Knapp's interpretation of the reason for the Colman call. "We came here," he rejoined (6, p. 67), “. . . not at all with a view to subordinate all others to the one question which . . . [Professor] Knapp suggests."

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Atherton wished the convention to devote only a small portion of its time and attention to the administrative functioning of research; instead he urged the convention to effect cooperation between the De

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partment and the colleges in a broad span of issues covering the entire field of agricultural education. In Atherton's view the paramount problem of collegiate attunement to the public involved factors in addition to research alone. Moreover, he sensed that the Colman convention, if skillfully encouraged, could serve as a launching site for a permanent land-grant association holding similar conventions in future.

The divergence in objectives between Atherton and Knapp revealed that the divisive issue of 1871 persisted. President Atherton, like his predecessors in 1871 and his presidential colleagues in 1885, challenged the bid of the partisans of research to use the Colman convention, in effect a temporary association of land-grant personnel, primarily for their purposes.

The pendulum swung to the Atherton position early in the sessions when Colman as presiding officer appointed to the key committee on resolutions and order of business, in addition to Professor Knapp, and Director Henry Elijah Alvord of the Houghton Farm Experiment Station, a panel of four presidents including Atherton. The Commissioner might have selected his appointees from a number of prominent station directors and professors of long experience present at the convention, such as G. H. Cook, C. A. Goessmann, A. R. Ledoux, W. R. Lazenby, I. P. Roberts, E. L. Sturtevant, N. S. Townshend. Yet Colman favored the presidents, men who soon demonstrated their ability to hold the floor.

An outspoken Missourian, Professor J. W. Sanborn (6, p. 24), immediately perceiving the consequences of Colman's policy of selection, informed the Commissioner, "On that committee . . . the experiment stations of the country are not represented. . . ." Sanborn's alertness resulted in the additional appointment of Director Charles W. Dabney of the North Carolina station. The decisions of the presidentweighted committee soon revealed that the convention would not proceed on the single premise that the delegates would search only for ways to accelerate the efficiency of the research process, but rather on the basis that the conventioneers would consider only those propositions which would assist the colleges to strengthen themselves as educational institutions.

RESOLUTIONS DRAFTED

The committee on order of business used this latter principle in drafting resolutions which, when accepted by the convention, would implement the three objectives announced in the Colman call. The committee endorsed the Cullen bill, which proposed to establish stations exclusively under collegiate jurisdiction (6, p. 42). Having acted in this way on one item of the Colman agenda, the committee then acted on a second; it drafted a plan of cooperation (6, p. 90), as follows:

Whereas one principal object is the establishment of closer relations between the Department of Agriculture and all institutions systematically engaged in active labors for agricultural progress; therefore,

Resolved, That in the opinion of this convention the first practical measure to secure cooperation is the creation of a bureau or division in the Department of Agriculture, supplied with the necessary clerical force, which shall be the special medium of intercommunication and exchange between the institutions intended

to be represented by this convention and the central office in charge of the details of this general plan of cooperation.

Resolved, That this convention respectfully recommends to the Commissioner, as one of the most important functions of the proposed bureau, the compilation and publication of a periodical bulletin of agricultural progress. . . This bulletin should contain, in a popular form, ready for the use of the people and the press, the latest experience and results in the progress of agricultural education, investigation. and experimentation, in this and in all other countries.

Thus the committee studiously avoided the position that the "special medium of intercommunication and exchange" in the Department should deal only with research matters, although the conventions since 1872 had regularly recommended the formation of such an agency for aiding the coordination of experimental activity (6, pp. 103-104). Moreover, the committee of 1885 assigned, as the first function of the recommended periodical bulletin, the reporting for popular consumption of "progress in agricultural education;" a responsibility preceding that of "investigation and experimentation." This same committee then arranged the program in such a way that numerous speakers could dwell on college rather than station concerns. President Edwin Willits (6, p. 67), the able successor of T. C. Abbot at Michigan, revealed the underlying concern of the college presidents when he remarked, "I would like to have you devise, if you can, any system of instruction that will lead the boys, that shall draw the boys, to the institution. . . ."

This preoccupation of the program committee prevented the research-minded men in the convention from discussing the last of Colman's assignments (and the first of Knapp's hopes), namely, the methodology to be followed in arranging immediate experimentation between college researchers and those in the Department. Research interested the presidents only so far as it might be able, in practice, to popularize the colleges; the projected stations appealed to them for the same reason. The approval by the convention of the committee's major resolutions, the assurance that the forthcoming stations would be tied securely to the colleges, Colman's willingness to cooperate with the colleges in the cause of education, the success in the effort to prevent the researchers from dominating the convention and the purposes of "cooperation"-all these points strengthened the presidential position which Atherton had insistently presented at the opening of the convention.

Colman capped the triumph by appointing President Atherton, Willits, and Stephen D. Lee as a legislative committee to collaborate with the Commissioner in persuading Congressmen to enact the Cullen bill. Atherton, who had already championed the Cullen bill before the House Committee on Agriculture in 1884 (6, p. 41), headed this committee on Capitol Hill. His capable lobbying aided the passage of the station legislation, a role which in later conventions gave him the prestige of founding father.

Thus Atherton early emerged as a champion of the station movement. In his attitude toward the stations, however, he contended consistently from the mid-eighties and thereafer that the Cullen and Hatch measures were designed solely to assist the colleges and to enable them to do via the stations the educational work which heretofore a lack of college funds prohibited. Atherton had small concern for the technical difficulties confronting the scientist; his interest and sympathy, like those of nearly all the college presidents of his day,