EXPERIMENTS WITPI FERTILIZERS. 67 



inaterial it increased the fodder but little and seemed to 

 lessen the yield of grain. Gypsum, or sulphate of lime, 

 but slightly increased the crop, indicating that it was 

 phosphoric acid instead of lime that was needed. Sulphate 

 of magnesia, which is generally considered of but little 

 value as a fertilizer, showed a decided eflect, especially by 

 increasing the proportion of grain to the fodder. It pro- 

 duced more grain than any other material when used alone, 

 except dissolved bone-black, and more than potash and 

 nitrogen used together iu No. 5. The most remarkable part 

 of this experiment was the result of a mistake which does 

 not appear in the table. Wood ashes were accidentally 

 dropped in 12 hills where sulphate of magnesia belonged, 

 but were mostly taken up as soon as the mistake was dis- 

 ■covered, and nothing more was thought about it until the 12 

 hills were seen going ahead of the rest. These 12 hills, 

 with both sulphate of magnesia and wood ashes, seemed 

 to produce proportionally more than any of the plots, which 

 must have been due to the reaction of the sulphate of mag- 

 nesia on the ashes, rendering them more readily available as 

 plant-food. While none of these plots produced paying 

 crops that year, as it was a cold, wet and unfavorable season 

 for corn, the soil being quite exhausted and the planting on 

 a sod matted with quack-grass roots, still the experiments 

 were more valuable than they would have been under differ- 

 ent conditions, and besides affordinof me a o;reat deal of 

 pleasure I learned from them valuable lessons which sub- 

 sequent experiments have confirmed ; and the knowledge 

 thus gained has been a decided source of profit to me. 



The succeeding year, 1880, I repeated these experiments 

 with corn on the same plots, and added others, and in Table 

 II. I give the results : — 



