406 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



with the Iowa and Illinois farmer in growing corn. It rests 

 wholly on this point ; and, in my paper referred to by Dr. 

 Lawes, I made this my chief point. 



My experience in this respect has been limited to a few 

 years, during which I have been growing corn repeatedly 

 with artificial manures. I am not in a position to say how 

 much nitrogen is naturally contained in my soil, which is 

 poor, and had been badly farmed by former owners; but 

 I suspect it is very little. The nearest approach to a 

 knowledge in this respect is the fact, that on part of a field 

 planted with corn, and left without any manure or fertilizer, 

 the crop produced did not bear one sound ear : there were 

 some small stalks and poor nubbins, but not one good ear, 

 on a strip four rods wide through the field. This field 

 (two acres), manured with six hundred pounds of the Mapes 

 corn-manure (containing twenty-three pounds and a half of 

 nitrogen) per acre, gave me ninety-eight bushels of shelled 

 corn containing about eighty-eight pounds of nitrogen per 

 acre. A plot of one-sixth of an acre in another field, ma- 

 nured in precisely the same manner, gave twenty-five bushels 

 and eight pounds of shelled corn, equivalent to a hundred 

 and fifty and six-sevenths bushels per acre. Here was pre- 

 sented a serious problem, and one upon which, it may be 

 easily perceived, depends a most important sequence for the 

 Eastern farmers, who are confronted with a harassing, if not 

 ruinous competition with Western farmers. This, with some 

 repeated crops, not grown experimentally, but in ordinary 

 farm-work, make up the sum of my personal experience. 



With this there are many similar experiences of others, ref- 

 erence to which may, perhaps, go no farther than the crops 

 grown on the Rural P'arm, a large number of experiments 

 collated by Professor Atwater, and several competitive crops 

 grown by farmers and farmers' boys. These all showed a 

 large product grown, while some of them showed a seriously 

 injurious effect from an excess of nitrogenous manures. 

 Now, there seems to be but one explanation for these facts ; 

 and that is, that corn is able to avail itself of a supi)ly of 

 nitrogen from some occult source, when it is sufficiently 

 provided with potash and phosphoric acid. What this 

 source is, I do not attempt now to question. The corn 

 gets the nitrogen, that stjems ceriain : and I infer from Dr. 



