UIHistories Project: A History of the University of Illinois by Kalev Leetaru
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Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1871 [PAGE 248]

Caption: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1871
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240 What are the laws and forces which enter into any agricultural product, animal or vegetable? What if they are many and complicated? Are they more so than the forces that have entered into the other results and deductions, that men ultimately have reached, and determined the laws of? We should remember this thing. If we can get one single element reduced to its law—if we can in one single case discover a law that is fixed and invariable and has the iorce of a law in a multiplicity of things—we have put, as it were, a streak of sunshine into it—we have got one fixed element in the problem, and everything else will be readily solved. As far as Dr. Miles' experiments which he suggests, and very wisely in the matter of feeding, you can take simple corn in its various forms, and, by a series of experiments carried out, you can ultimately arrive at something like a law in regard to the effects of feeding an animal on this one article of diet. May you not ultimately reach a law of animal feeding and growth and fattening, which you will carry elsewhere ? The multiplicity of forces that enter into these experiments, to my mind, only prove this: the necessity of combination and co-operation. Suppose, for instance, that the Agricultural College in this State would try certain experiments as carefully as we can. We are trying them under a careful experimenter, who is present, and we may ultimately in the course of years reach a conclusion, as we think. Somebody in Pennsylvania tries the same set of experiments and he reaches a different result, revealing to us what we alone should not have suspected perhaps, that there were climatic differences or something or another that modified the result, and which therefore vitiated our supposed law, and compelled us to start afresh before we dared to publish the results of our experiments to the world, as an established agricultural law. It seems to me the argument is sound in the matter of the proposed co-operation. How far this co-operation can go will be determined by the nature of the experiments. We shall see how far we are under different conditions, such as will compel us to make allowances lor our own and other experiments. To me it is a very serious practical question, and I suppose it is to the gentlemen connected with these institutions. The public are expecting certain things of us, and demanding certain things rightly of us. They ask us to do perhaps what we cannot. They ask that we shall so experiment as to discover for them how they may cultivate corn to the best advantage in this and other States; or how to feed animals, or what varieties of corn are best worth cultivating. They ask us to enter upon a set of experiments to determine it. Suppose you in Pennsylvania, or