AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL OF VICTORIA. 



NOVEIVIBER, 1904. 



THE POSITION OF CHEMISTRY AS A FACTOR IN 

 AGRICULTURAL ADVANCEMENT.* 



By F. J. Howell, Ph. D. 



The inter-relation of effort in the various departments of human 

 activity is scarcely realised. Busied as we are in our own particular 

 sphere, there is hardly a recognition that the practices of our own 

 special industry are being continually re-acted upon and altered, not 

 so much by activities within that sphere, as by the application of 

 discoveries made by others engaged without that sphere, and busied 

 in an apparently entirely foreign set of operations. Among all 

 occupations, there is perhaps none which so much bears the apparent 

 character of being self sustained, and which wears such a seeming- 

 complete isolation from interference with all outside thought and 

 discovery, as the occupation of farming. And yet, the farm practices 

 of to-day have been, perhaps, moulded to a greater extent by outside 

 influence and investigation, than by the individual efforts of genera- 

 tions of farmers themselves. The chemist, the physicist, the 

 botanist, the metallurgist and the mechanician, has each contributed 

 some new fact, that has helped to lift farming from a matter of 

 dibbling in seeds with a pointed stick to the position it holds to-day. 

 The object of my paper is not to show the debt which agriculture 

 owes generally to outside activities, but to disclose to you the 

 relations which one science, among many, holds to the calling you 

 pursue. 



Fresh from the farm, with its conditions and practices so strikingly 

 dissimilar, the scenes of an agricultural chemical laboratory would, I 

 feel sure, prove very singular to you. The sight of a number of analysts 

 busily engaged in a set of operations with tubes, flasks, retorts and 

 apparatus generally of an apparently mysterious nature, would, I fear, 

 raise doubts in many of you as to the possibility of all this having 

 any connection with tlie advancement of agriculture. In^ what way, 

 you might ask, can a set of such operations, carried out in a dingy 

 town building, influence in the least the life, the welfare, the line of 

 present action, or the future conduct of either myself or the class I 

 belong. to ? Such a question is one which might naturally suggest 

 itself to nine out of ten among you ; and yet, those tubes, and flasks, 

 and retorts, are the working tools of a science which has done more 

 to revolutionise the whole system of agricultural practice than all 

 other agencies combined. A science which has still, even to-day 

 perhaps, a more intimate bearing on the success of your present and 



• A paper prepared for the Farmers' Convention at Kyneton, June, 1904. 



