1902.] STORRS 'experiment STATION — DAIRlYING. 243 



its work in this line has been in the development of principles 

 already understood, but some of it is new. That to which it 

 has the largest claim to a measure of originality is the work 

 upon the acquisition of nitrogen by leguminous plants, and 

 especially the effect of nitrogenous fertilizers in increasing 

 the proportion of nitrogen in grasses and cereals. This is all 

 more or less familiar to you now, and you have learned 

 that there are certain plants like the clovers and others which 

 absorb nitrogen from the air, but when I first began to talk 

 to you in this board I used to tell you, and I thought it was 

 right, because the other chemists thought so too, that in 

 order to get nitrogen into your plants you must either have 

 a store of it in your soil or you must put it in through your 

 fertilizers, as the plants could not get it anywhere else. We 

 were a little mistaken about that after all. Some of you re- 

 member how we used to discuss that, and how from investi- 

 gations made by our own station, and from far more liberal 

 and extensive ones made in Europe, the results of which 

 were gradually established, so that today we know that the 

 leguminous plants do gather nitrogen from the inexhaustible 

 store in the air, and store it up in their own tissues so that 

 the farmer has it there without money and without price. 

 The experiments made by the station along these lines have 

 helped to bring out more clearly the ways in which the farmer 

 can increase the nitrogen supply for his soil, his crops, and 

 his stock. The simplest way is for the farmer to grow legum- 

 inous crops, like clover, cow peas, soy beans, and ordinary 

 beans and peas, as among the earliest experiments of the 

 station were those by which it was shown that these crops 

 gather their nitrogen from the air. These crops the farmer 

 may utilize in different ways in order to get nitrogen. He 

 may plow under his clover, and thus store away nitrogen for 

 a future crop, or he may gather his crop and use it as fodder, 

 and by so doing he accomplishes a double purpose; as he 

 passes out this fodder it is a food which is richer in protein, 

 and he gets a manure which is richer in nitrogen, and he puts 

 that back into the earth, and thus continues to enrich the 

 land, but he also gets an increased product of milk. The 

 roots and the stubble which are left on the land when the 

 crop is cut also contain a considerable amount of nitrogen 

 which goes back to enrich the soil. 



