346 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



in Ohio. A few farmers had, in a desultory way, made some experi- 

 ments, but Ohio settlement began a long time after that of Pennsyl- 

 vania and the Pennsylvania German, when he came into eastern 

 Ohio, left an old soil, one that had been in cultivation for a century 

 and came on to a new soil lying in the forest, and he found that on 

 this new soil the conditions were such that the treatment required 

 was very different from that of the soils he had left, and, therefore, 

 his ideas respecting the use of lime were modified and that use 

 gradually disappeared from the State, so that I don't suppose that 

 100 tons of lime had been used in the last 10 or 15 years of the period 

 ending 25 years ago. 



So thoroughly had we become possessed with the idea that the soil, 

 that all ordinary soils possessed sufQcient lime for all purposes, that 

 in planning the experiment with fertilizers and manures at the Ex- 

 periment Station 22 years ago, we did not think it worth while to 

 make any provision for testing the effect of lime and left it entirely 

 out of our calculations. We had been allowed, after having spent 10 

 years in learning how to experiment on the location at Columbus, 

 we had been allowed to move the station to a new location, to select 

 a land that seemed to us, from our past experience, especially adapted 

 to the purposes of field experiments, and we there laid out a series of 

 experiments in the use of fertilizers and manures in the hope of 

 learning how to better maintain the fertility of a fairly fertile soil, 

 how better to recover the fertility of wasted soil, for it had been 

 possible for our farmers, in the brief period they had occupied this 

 land to tremendously waste its natural stores of fertility. The farm 

 we selected for our purposes — and we made the selection because we 

 had been criticized for work done on a more fertile soil on the score? 

 that work done on that soil at Columbus was not a sufficient guide 

 to the farmer who was living on the poorer soils of the State, there- 

 fore we took the pains to select a soil that had been robbed of its 

 fertility by previous management, and we succeeded in securing a 

 farm that had been entered about 90 years ago by a Pennsylvania 

 German family and subjected to the thorough husbandry which 

 the Pennsylvania Germans knows so well how to exercise for some 

 fifty years, during which time an excellent stone house had been built 

 and a large barn and other improvements made showing that the 

 land had been a fertile soil in the beginning. At the end of that 

 period it was sold and purchased as an investment and for 25 years 

 after that it was rented, and when it came into our possession, it 

 showed every evidence of having been despoiled of its fertility; an 

 old meadow upon which we located some of these experiments had 

 been in timothy for several years until nothing was left gradually 

 but five fingers and a few scattering weeds. The wheat stubbles on 

 other portions of the farm were thin, showing a light growth of 

 wheat. We started there and experimented in the growth of corn, 

 wheat, oats and timothy in five year rotations, giving five tracts of 

 land to this work in order to grow every crop each season, and we 

 started with the use of both fertilizers and manure, using different 

 combinations of fertilizers and different applications of common 

 open barnyard manure, a system of economy practiced by the farm- 

 ers of Ohio at that time. 



Dr. Thorne then read the following paper: 



