AGKICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATIONS. £71 



serve the master of a vessel, who can identify a star and use 

 a sextant to find his position at sea. 



We labor here not only under the disadvantage which the 

 educated German farmer has in a good degree overcome, by 

 the use of the permanently valuable facts laid down in these 

 tables, but we likewise suffer from the circumstance, that 

 when we would try to sail by " dead reckoning," there is so 

 much ignorant misrepresentation, or wilful fraud practised 

 upon us in throwing the log or by hanging out ftilse lights, 

 that we are in continual uncertainty as to our course. 



If we gather from the best consideration of the evidence at 

 our hands that a field needs potash or nitrogen, or phosphoric 

 acid, we find plenty of parties willing to sell us these things, 

 but we also find that we cannot depend upon getting the worth 

 of our money. Our markets are full of "superphosphates," 

 "poudrettes," "tobacco-growers," "bone dust," "bone flour," 

 ''ground bone," of "bone meal," "pure," "best," "finest," 

 ''celebrated," "rotted," and "dissolved," of "meat scraps," 

 "blood and bone fertilizers," "animal dust," &c., &c., some 

 good, some bad, and in many cases the good appearing to be 

 on the way to the bad. Many of our farmers have laid out 

 their money for some of these things, and know that they 

 were cheated by not getting what was promised, and what 

 they supposed they were securing. Some have been bitten 

 so badly that they purchase nothing, unless it is ashes, plas- 

 ter, bone, fish scrap, or something which they can judo-e of 

 by its looks. Some again, have purchased these very fer- 

 tilizers whose value they believed they could estimate by 

 inspection, only to learn when too late that they had been 

 ingeniously deceived, and that the supposed "bone" con- 

 tained twenty to fifty per cent, of water, oyster shells, plaster 

 or nitre cake, which had no value for their farming. 



The German farmers have had the same experience. It is 

 just about twenty-five years since in Germany, as here, the 

 trade in superphosphates, guano, and similar commercial fer- 

 tilizers began. The same stupendous frauds by adulteration 

 and dilution of good things were practiced there as they have 



