THE ELECTROCULTURE OF CROPS 613 



impossible. However, as Ingen-Housz connected his plants 

 directly with the collectors, and he describes the plants as 

 shrivelling up after treatment, his experiments simply indicate 

 the possibility of killing plants by electricity. 



In 1789, the year following Ingen-Housz's more elaborate 

 experiments, D'Ormoy found that the electric discharge stimu- 

 lated the germination of mustard (and lettuce) seed. This, it 

 will be observed, was Nollet's original experiment. 



The few experiments we have cited of the many performed 

 in this first period of half a century are not only typical of the 

 eighteenth century, but we find the same repeated in the 

 nineteenth century ; the experiments differ only in the people 

 who perform them, in the means of producing the discharge, 

 and in their being usually conducted on a larger scale ; but in 

 all we find the same absence of any realisation of the actual 

 position of the problem. 



We find that a lively interest in the action of atmospheric 

 electricity on the plant had developed in this country before 

 the end of the first half of the nineteenth century. Thus Forster 

 in 1 844 reported the results of some experiments with chevalier 

 barley in which atmospheric electricity was collected by a 

 horizontal wire and conducted to the soil by vertical wires at 

 either end of the horizontal one. Forster found the electrified 

 crop assumed a darker green colour and grew more rapidly 

 than the non-electrified control, while the yield of grain from 

 the electrified plot was double and the yield of straw triple 

 that of an average crop. In 1846 William Sturgeon, lecturer 

 at the Manchester Institute of Natural and Experimental 

 Science, went so far as to say that Forster 's experiments " have 

 commenced a new era in electro-cultural enquiries ; and their 

 flattering results have induced several persons, electricians and 

 others, to try the same plan on crops of various kinds of the 

 last year's growth." However, it was no new era that was 

 inaugurated by Forster's experiments ; it was simply a repe- 

 tition of older experiments that resulted, the methods employed 

 often being less refined than those of earlier workers. Never- 

 theless, Sturgeon's paper on the Electroculture of Farm Crops, 

 published in the Journal of the Highland and Agricultural 

 Society for March 1 846, contains some very trenchant remarks 

 on the position of the subject. At that time the importance 

 of manuring was coming into great prominence as a result of 



