I06 TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF CHEMICAL INVESTIGATION. 



of fertilisers annually, subject them to chemical analysis and 

 publish the results, together with the names of the. fertilisers 

 and their respective vendors, so as to enable farmers to see the 

 composition of at all events some of the materials purchased by 

 them, and their suitability to the needs of soil and crops. xA.t 

 length, after surmounting many difficulties and obstacles which 

 I have recently dwelt on elsewhere,'*' the Act was promulgated, 

 and under its provisions more than 150 fertilisers were analysed 

 last vear. The result has been that the control of the sale of 

 fertilisers has been organised with a surprising celerity. Diffi- 

 culties of nomenclature have vanished ; the employment of 

 unscientific or misleading terminology has ceased ; such terms 

 as " guano " are no longer applied to non-nitrogenous manures ; 

 the faulty stating of percentages has been stopped ; in the case 

 of such articles as superphosphates definite grades have been 

 established : the fineness of bone meal and of ibasic slag has 

 been legally fixed ; and all this has been done with the mercan- 

 tile community acting in the most perfect accord with the tech- 

 nical advisers of the Government, and assisting the latter by 

 proving their willingness to abide by the definitions which 

 characterise the fertilisers law and its concomitant regulations, 

 as they do the other two statutes referred to in the previous 

 section. 



Fanners can now be far more certain than ever before that 

 the article they purchase is not appreciably different in compo- 

 sition from what they intend to buy. 



Agricultural Produce. 



Three legislative enactments have 'been mentioned. A fourth 

 had been not only drafted by me for submission to Parliament, 

 but had been introduced as one of the series of statutes intended 

 to stimulate and protect producers, and had been actually read 

 a first time in Parliament, when the prospect of Union obliterated 

 for a time all legislation on minor matters ; and so the Agricul- 

 tural Products Bill was temporarily shelved. This Bill had also 

 come into being through the connection of the Agricultural 

 Department Laboratories with the administration of the Food 

 Adulteration Act. and in consequence of the knowledge gained 

 from the routine work of the latter the need was realised of 

 taking legislative measures to foster the manufacture of Colonial 

 articles of agricultural produce to an extent which could not be 

 attained so long as they were subject to the competition of the 

 cheap, inferior products that were being poured into the country 

 from overseas. The articles whose manufacture in a pure con- 

 dition the Bill was particularly designed to stimulate and protect 

 were first of all the dairy products butter and cheese, but jam 

 and grain products were also specially dealt with. The result 

 cf examining about eight hundred samples of butter had been 

 to show that, eighteen or twenty years ago, the addition to butter 

 of margarine and other foreign fats was of common occurrence, 



* Union Agricultural Journal, March, igii. 



