Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1871 [PAGE 252]

EXTRACTED TEXT FROM PAGE:

244 on any point which has been spoken of, so as to make the comparison as valuable as it would be if they established, as I said before, a series of experiments with a few colleges whose conditions are about the same. Another thing, if you are going to conduct a few experiments by all the colleges, you and I will be dead before we know much about the results. People are in a hurry in these days, and if we can do a little something to aid those around us in such particular states, as we will have to do to avoid " going up the spout," that will be the much better way. They are not going to wait for us a great while. People are too much in a hurry, and if the agricultural colleges do not do something soon, I think they will ask in vain for much assistance or sympathy. I think that would be the result. I believe I am not mistaken that the idea in regard to whether we are compelled to have experiments is not correct. I think the law contemplates experiments as imperative on the subject. I will not be positive, but I know this, that in our reports we are required by law to give the results of experiments. Prof. Daniels—I concur in the remarks made, as to the difficulty of experiments, and I believe it is true, as has been said, that nearly all the experiments that have been made are useless as such, that is, useless as giving us any general law, or any data from which we can draw any conclusions. But they have been of use in this, that they have taught us where we must begin. There is another thing that I think is true—lamentably true—that the very men from whom we must look for opposition, and who will be continually against us, are precisely those men for whom we are laboring. They are looking for some immediate results. They expect, as I heard a farmer say, the kind of education from the agricultural colleges, which will enable a man to take up a handful of soil and feel of it, and tell you all it is composed of. That is the kind of knowledge they are looking for, and those are the men from whom we are going to get opposition—the men for whom we are laboring. I do not believe that any man who has not been personally connected with careful and accurate experiments, has anything like an adequate idea of the difficulty there is in connection with carrying on experiments. It grows upon me every year as I am connected with it. I have lost faith in the results I have obtained every year, because I see how slight variations affect the experiment. So I have not a great deal of faith in the experiments that have been performed, I do not care by whom, or where. But I know we are getting nearer and nearer to what will be true, and what we shall find to be true, and the only way to get at it is by patient, earnest work, and