1882.] EXPERIMENTS WITH FERTILIZERS. 343 



ACCOUNT OF FIELD EXPERIMENTS WITH 



FEKTILIZERS, 1881. 



BY PROF. W. O. ATWATER. 



The last four reports of the Connecticut Board of Agriculture 

 have contained accounts of a series of field experiments which 

 were begun in 1877, at the suggestion of the writer, then director 

 of the State Experiment Station, and have been continued until 

 the present. 



The enterpise has been assuming larger and larger proportions, 

 until the demand for space for report has outgrown the limits of 

 this volume. At the invitation of the U. S. Commissioner of Agri- 

 culture, I have undertaken to prepare a somewhat extended re- 

 sume of results of the experiments for publication in the Report of 

 the Agricultural Department. Meanwhile, since a number have 

 been carried out in Connecticut, and the Secretary of the State 

 Board assures me that many readers of the report will be inter- 

 ested to know the outcome of another year's work, I give a shoxt 

 account of some of the Connecticut experiments, and a still briefer 

 reference to the results obtained elsewhere. As the general re- 

 sults are very similar to those detailed in former volumes of the 

 Connecticut report, such a brief statement will, I think, be as sat- 

 isfactory to most if not all its readers as a larger one, and will 

 give opportunity to dwell more fully than I have previously been 

 able to do upon another topic which seems to me worthy of con- 

 sideration, namely: the usefulness of such work to the experi- 

 menters and the communities they influence, as well as to agricul- 

 tural science in general. 



Accordingly I shall select a few salient examples of work done 

 by Connecticut farmers and hope that what they are doing may 

 serve as an incitement and an encouragement to their fellow crafts- 

 men to do likewise. I regret that severe pressure of other 

 engagements necessitates a rather crude and hasty putting to- 

 gether of the material at hand. 



The experiments have been of the same general character as in 

 previous seasons ; the modifications and enlargements being such 

 as have been naturally suggested by experience. The description of 

 the experiments and their results, therefore, must be more or less 

 similar to what has been said before. 



The experiments of the five seasons have been conducted by a 



