356 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



procured samples of fertilizers offered for sale, which were also 

 analyzed. Excellent fertilizers were found, others little better 

 than good surface soil ; but the price of all was too much in excess 

 of their valuation, or, in other words, the crude materials from 

 which the fertilizers were mixed could have been bought by the 

 farmers for much less than the fertilizers themselves. Finally, the 

 analyses were published, with the poor ones and frauds fearlessly 

 assailed, and the best ones pointed out. The result was inevita- 

 ble. Honest fertilizer manufacturers co-operated with the station. 

 Other States than Connecticut passed the necessary laws, took up 

 the same work, found the same conditions and eradicated them ; so 

 that to-day the average cost of fertilizers exceeds their valuation 

 barely enough to pay for mixing, while frauds have almost totally 

 disappeared. When we consider that hundreds of thousands of 

 tons of commercial fertilizers, averaging at least thirty dollars per 

 ton, are annually applied to our soils, we can scarcely overesti- 

 mate the value of this one line of work. The Director of the New 

 York Station, Dr. Peter Collier, calculated in 1888 that the effect 

 of twenty years of fertilizer control had been an average saving 

 of 61*43 per cent in the cost of the three constituents of plant-food 

 which are liable to be deficient in soils. The German experiment 

 stations have had very similar experience. 



It has long been known that no single plant furnishes the kind 

 and amount of nutriment to give the best results with animals 

 when fed to them, and farmers have used varying combinations of 

 greater or less value for years. The German experiment stations 

 took up, among their earlier investigations, the determination of 

 the basis upon which the efficiency of these combinations rested, 

 and after years of study it was found that it was due in the main 

 to the relation existing between the digestible nitrogenous and 

 non-nitrogenous constituents of the food ; that the ratio between 

 these ought to vary according to the purposes for which the ani- 

 mal was fed ; and the amount of digestible nitrogenous and non- 

 nitrogenous food which was necessary for the various purposes was 

 determined. The tables thus given to the world by German inves- 

 tigation have been found to not wholly agree with our conditions, 

 but they have been of invaluable service in applying the sound 

 principle which underlies them to American stock-feeding ; and it 

 has been an important part of the work of our experiment stations 

 to adapt them to our somewhat different needs. A large amount 

 of success has attended their efforts, and, while the principle of 

 feeding, according to the chemical composition of the food, can not 

 as yet be said to be of anything like general application in the 

 United States, still it is quite widely used, with greater or less suc- 

 cess. For the more important purposes for which animals are fed, 

 our ordinary plants, with the exception of some of the leguniinosae, 



