Excerpt from Eighteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Animal Industry, for the Year 1901

The result is that much of our time is spent in training young men, who, as soon as they become competent, are called away to other posi tions where the salaries are higher. It has been said that these men remain in the country and the country has the benefit of the training which they have received here, and while this is true to a certain extent, it does not improve the situation from the farmer's point of view. These men do not necessarily continue in the same line of work. Some of them go as teachers where they are no longer engaged in original research; some of them go into commercial houses; and others may go into medical or veterinary practice. In all of these cases their services are absolutely lost to the field of agricultural investigation. It will probably be generally admitted that the Depart. Ment of Agriculture exists for the benefit of the agricultural industry, not to educate men for professors in universities, for experts in com mercial houses, or for practitioners of medicine; and, while it is desir able that men should be educated somewhere for such lines of work, their training is not a fair compensation to our stock raisers for delay in the solution of urgent and important problems or for failures to bring relief from constant and distressing losses.

While we stop to train men to fill the places vacated, the expense of maintaining the laboratory goes on, the salaries now established go on, the experiment station must be kept in operation, but the work does not progress as it should. During the past six years the position of chief of the Pathological Division has three times become vacant, and inc-st of our investigators have been tendered positions with higher salaries than they are receiving here. As it requires at least two years for a new man, however competent he may be by education and preliminary training elsewhere, to become familiar with our methods, to understand our problems, and to get any reliable results from his experiments, it is readily seen that such frequent changes almost prevent the solution of the more serious and complicated ques tions with which we are confronted. To elucidate the practical ques tions connected with the control of hog cholera, for instance, requires a long series of experiments without interruption. And conducted by the same person.

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