The two terms "practical information" and "original researches"-weathered the storms of revision and deletion in the career of Congressional legislation. Unfortunately, however, the two posed a persistent problem in administration of the Hatch Act. Was the main emphasis to be placed on "original research"? Or, was the primary goal to spread "practical information" relating to agriculture? Had the Act relied specifically on "original research", some of the State station directors could have moved more rapidly toward the fundamental type of research.

Following passage of the Hatch Act, the first generation of station. workers early discovered that the scientist's emphasis on "original researches" suffered sharply in the constant competition with the nonscientist's insistence on "practical information." While the latitude of the Act was discouraging to science-conscious leaders like Atwater and Johnson, the attitude of the "practical-minded" men-those untrained in advanced scientific discipline-was destined to predominate for the rest of the century.

The advocates of "original research" accepted the reality that, under a democratic form of government, administration of publicly appropriated monies should follow the course of that which is most popular. Even so, the agricultural experiment stations did, in their early years, write a remarkable record of accomplishment, one that by 1900 had materially raised the status of the stations as scientific institutions of learning. No discovery did more, in the early years of the experiment station movement, than did development of the Babcock test in 1890, which provided a quick, simple test for butterfat in milk and therewith a practical marketing method for a commodity that is vital in the human diet.

What activity did the act of 1887 "intend" the stations to perform? The search for the answer to this many-sided question led the annual conventions of the Association deep into debate and disagreement in the nineties. Dr. Wilbur Atwater, the first Director of the Office of Experiment Stations, set a high standard of station performance during his 2-year tenure as he sought to explain to the directors of the newly created stations the policies and procedures which, to his mind, would most ably fulfill the expectations implicit in the organic legislation. In mid-November of 1889 Atwater interpreted for the Association the spirit of the Hatch Act. Three principles, he maintained, should guide the station enterprise. "The stations should do well whatever they attempt," he declared (7). "They should not attempt too much; they should endeavor to secure permanent rather than temporary results." He then urged each station to adopt the following operational procedure:

By close contact with the farmers of the State the station should ascertain what are the most pressing and important needs of the agriculture of its section; it should then select from those problems a few which it feels itself most competent to deal with, and plan experiments which shall be thorough and far reaching, and patiently set itself to work with due regard to all the details which will make the experiments complete.

Time enough should be taken in making the plan to have it reasonably sure that the correct principles of experimentation are perceived and adopted, and that everything necessary to success has been provided for. In other words, under the Hatch Act, fairly interpreted, it is the primary duty of the individual station to confine its work to a comparatively limited number of important

'Italic numbers in parentheses refer to Literature Cited, p. 107.

problems which it may reasonably hope to solve to the lasting benefit of the agriculture of its State. In this way, by such work as is deservedly denominated scientific, whether it be in the field, the stable, or the laboratory, can the stations attain that high measure of success which will be of widespread and permanent benefit to the Agriculture of the United States, and, it may be, of the world.2

This classic advice, drawn from Atwater's lengthy experience in scientific research, stated in simple terms the elements essential for the successful and productive direction of station work. Select for study only a few problems; plan for each problem a program of painstaking experiments; persist in each program, complete it, and establish a conclusion; and operate the station as a scientific institution at all times. This formula, predicted Atwater, would assure the most effective combination of quality and quantity in scientific output; therefore it would provide in the long run the most practical approach for station investigators.

To what extent, however, should the station's concern with attunement to the "practical farmers" be permitted to influence the policymaking and the operations of the new institutions? The Atwater formula listed only two stages in the process of discovery and diffusion where the station's constituency should influence the station's activity. First, the agricultural public should keep the station management informed of the difficulties encountered in practical farming; this awareness the governing board must have in order to select properly the limited number of problems which the station could most effectively investigate. Beyond this point the farmer could offer very little assistance to the scientist. Second, the station must publish scientific findings in a form enabling the public to understand and adopt them.

Undeniably the successful application of the station discoveries that continuous and assiduous research produced from time to time, alone could make tax-supported research worthwhile; therefore, the scientist must contribute to the public, in return for the latter's support, the tested results of scientific investigation. The station in Atwater's judgment owed no further obligation to the farmer, nor did it need further assistance from the farmer.

SCIENCE VIEWPOINT URGED

The responsibility for exercising shrewd judgment in selecting lines of research, and also for supplying all necessary facilities for the conduct of research, Atwater placed squarely on the governing board. Similarly, the responsibility for the operational effectiveness of the station force and program he placed entirely on the director. Under these circumstances the process of scientific productivity, so ran Atwater's thinking, would demand the development of the director's keenest talents. Successful station work began, then, with a governing board and a director who jointly insisted, as Atwater had penned in the Report of Station Work in 1888, that "the highest scientific ideal be maintained and every effort be made toward its realization" (8, p. 32). Thus the viewpoint of the scientist rather than the viewpoint of the farmer, Atwater contended, must govern the administrative policy of a station earnestly desiring to serve the farmers' welfare and the public interest.

2 His italics.

Many stations could not, however, immediately follow Atwater's instructions. Already the course of station development, as Atwater well knew, inclined in a different direction. "The agricultural public," Director W. W. Cooke of Vermont had remarked at the preceding convention in January of 1889 (9) “. . . is compelling the stations to take up lower problems, if you choose to so call them, or 'practical problems,' as the farmers class them, which require immediate work, and give promise, although often visionary, of immediate results." To his sympathetic brethren he further observed, "You all understand

how demands from all sides, compelling us to divide our time among a multitude of different subjects, make it impossible for us to work out any one subject broadly. Thorough work," he added with conviction, "gives the best results, but the farmers all over the United States, knowing that these stations have been organized, are demanding immediate results."

The tax-supported stations, vulnerable to local pressures, found it no less difficult, even as the years passed, to escape from an operational framework dominated by the farmers' prevailing concept of the duties and type of research which the stations should perform. Moreover, in 1890 Director Dabney, deeply disturbed because the reports of station work revealed only a "small amount of original investigation," outspokenly accused many stations of surrendering to nonscientific standards. "We believe," he formally reported for the Association's Committee on Chemistry (10), "that our boards of control or directors are, many of them, too anxious to obtain immediate favor with the public, and are . . . [merely] trying to show the farmer how he can make his business pay a little better. This trend Dabney denounced, for it "was leading many to build their stations without any solid foundation whatever in good work." Thus the station movement encountered in its earliest nationwide experience the same difficulty that had plagued Professor Johnston in Scotland a half-century earlier.3

How, then, could the stations maintain a close affiliation with the farm population, secure widespread public approval and, simultaneously, not deviate from the Atwater standard? The search for the answer to this central question absorbed the energy of station spokesmen for the remainder of the 19th century.

Unquestionably the circumstances of origin had placed the stations in a democratic environment dictating that the new institutions must, in order to survive, win the farmers' praise. To earn such praise, the stations had no choice but to minister to the farmer and his immediate cares. Nevertheless, would not the ultimate success and value of the enterprise, when judged by the coming generations, depend more imperatively on the stations' record of scientific productivity instrumental in improving and perhaps revolutionizing agricultural technology? Did not that mission of technological improvement demand, in turn, that the stations without delay create a scientific atmosphere, adhere strictly to the rules of scientific investigation, and concentrate a substantial segment of resources and talents on problems which only the scientist, but not the farmer, would call "practical"?

This reasoning had prompted from Atwater's Committee on Station Work the solemn adjuration that the record of scientific produc3 See Chapter 2, p. 10.

tivity would decide the issue of life or death for the station movement (8). "The future usefulness of the stations," that committee had observed in 1888, "will depend upon what they discover of permanent value, and this must come largely from the most abstract and profound research; to forget this," the committee had warned, "will be fatal."

No scientist perceived more acutely and sympathetically than did Atwater the nature of the farmers' pressure on station personnel, yet in his judgment the necessity for scientific attainment applied even more insistently. He contended, furthermore, that the farmers, recognizing their own long-range interests, would support the enforcement of his high standard of administration. "The American farmer," he reassured the directors in 1889 (7), "is after all most interested in the solution of certain large problems connected with his profession and is likely to be more patient with a station which holds itself rigidly to careful and thorough investigations of relatively few but important matters than with one which gives him many useful hints on little details but does not undertake any really serious work in his behalf."

STANDARDS WERE HIGH

The Atwater standard, though simple in its constituent features, proved difficult to administer, for few stations could supply in the early nineties the facilities and highly trained personnel necessary for its observance. Atwater's standard called for a topnotch scientist as a full-time director; a staff of scientists highly trained in the latest techniques of research, substantially freed from undergraduate teaching assignments, and motivated to emulate the professional excellence of the scientific investigators of the European stations; a system of organization which established activity and built strength only in those disciplines promising the greatest aid in specific lines carefully selected for investigation. The station enterprise, viewed nationally, seriously lacked these prerequisites.

These deficiencies disturbed Director Henry, who had sought diligently to remedy them in Wisconsin. He reminded the Association in 1893, as he noted in his presidential address the shortcomings of American station work (13), that the quality of performance would not reach a satisfactory level until these prerequisites were instituted. The newness of the American establishment, he conceded, would for a limited time condone a lack of significant achievement. How much additional time, however, would the stations require to secure topquality researchers, concentrate their attention on selected problems, and "grow out of amateur efforts into the true scientific spirit?" Henry sympathized with the governing boards; nevertheless, in his words there lay a deep apprehensiveness that those boards were postponing the introduction of the administrative system demanded by the Atwater standard.

Did the personnel of the land-grant institution have a clear concept of high-level scientific research, its aims and its methods? Did they grasp the significance of Atwater's expression, "the most abstract and profound research?" Several skilled directors in the nineties, after Atwater had resigned from his Washington post, attempted at the

yearly meetings of the Association to prevent the spread of the complacent attitude that Henry had criticized.

George E. Morrow, a stalwart conventioneer since the first gathering in 1871 and the station helmsman at the University of Illinois, advised in 1894 (21), "I would have more of research and experiment along purely scientific lines, not restricting such work to that which gives large promise of immediate and direct practical application, not stopping it even if good men are unable to see its utility." The concentration on agronomy and corn genetics demonstrated in the following decade that the Illinois station took seriously this advice from the founder of its Morrow Plots.

Samuel W. Johnson, a pioneer in station-founding in earlier years but now an elder statesman nearing retirement, amplified the Morrow theme in his presidential address to the Association in 1896. Director Johnson of the Connecticut State station matter-of-factly described his model project in fundamental research, one which for the preceding 7 years had absorbed the entire time of a research chemist supported by a portion of the Hatch income. This project, planned and conducted in a resolute attempt to discover the composition and properties of the protein substances in numerous feedstuffs, Johnson considered a necessary preparation for determining in later longrange studies the nutritive value of individual vegetable proteins. This study, Johnson and his board of control had agreed, should continue without interruption in the coming years until it yielded the answers sought. This line of research, though Johnson in 1896 could not have predicted its specific outcome, led in later decades to the discovery of the vitamin and to other significant advances in the study of human nutrition.

The opportunity and the necessity to conduct abstract research of this type, Johnson prophesied in 1896, lay in the near future for every station. "For some of us," he declared, "that duty is already knocking at our doors; for all of us the time is short during which we can justifiably neglect to kindle and to tend and direct the searchlights of truth."

The more the public could be brought to understand the station's function of scientific productivity, Johnson believed, the more that public would approve an increasing concentration on basic research. Each station, then, must labor patiently and persistently to persuade its current constituency of farmers to appreciate the scientists view of research, and not permit the farmers' contemporary standard of research perpetually to dominate policy-making at the stations. "Let us hope," he observed with patriarchal mildness (17), “that ere long in this country, as in the Old World, the stations will be empowered to put the capable investigators into positions where they can give their powers unreservedly and exclusively to discovery."

JORDAN-THE NEW SPOKESMAN

Whitman Jordan, the emerging spokesman for the younger generation of directors, seized the torch from Johnson's aging hand. A persistent failure to comprehend the distinctions between "instruction" and "inquiry", Jordan aggressively informed the convention of 1897 (18), characterized the attitude of most land-grant personnel. The mounting emphasis on farm institute work, added to the perennial