310 Rain FallitKj at Rothamsted 



supplied in Mie maniuei. Further, they analysed the rain falling at 

 Rothamsted, and their results indicated that it supplied oidy about 

 5 lb. per acre of ammonia^, a quantity far below the 50 lb. of nitrogen 

 needed by a 32 bushel crop of wheat. Their analytical procedure was 

 extremely laborious, the Nessler test not then having been devised; in 

 some experiments it even involved the distillation of over two hundred- 

 weights of rain, and evaporation of the distillate with sulphuric acid. 

 Lawes and Gilbert had not been the first in the field; they acknowledged 

 their indebtedness to Boussingault who, working on his experimental 

 farm at Bechelbronn in Alsace, with simpler methods and much smaller 

 quantities of rain, had obtained results very similar to their own^. 



Lawes and Gilbert were unable to make satisfactory determinations 

 of the nitric nitrogen in the rain although they recognised its presence: 

 further analyses were therefore made in the two following years, 1855 

 and 1856, but the work was not done in the Rothamsted laboratories, 

 Gilbert being too fully occupied with the field plots; it was carried out 

 by J. T. Way, then a promising young agricultural cheinist. His figures 

 also were far lower than the crop requirements, being .in 1855 only 

 6-5 lb. per acre, and in 1856 8-0 lb. per acre for the sum of ammonia* 

 and nitrate. The regular determinations were then discontinued, but 

 numbers of occasional analyses were made, first by Edward Frankland 

 and afterwards by Warington. These results were quite consistent with 

 the measurements of 1855 and 1856, and lent no support to Liebig's 

 view. 



The subject would perhaps have been allowed to drop, but for the 

 circumstance that Lawes and Gilbert in 1870 erected the famous drain 

 gauges at Rothamsted and proceeded to make determinations of the 

 amount of nitrate and ammonia percolating through them. This 

 necessitated systematic analyses of the whole of the rainfall and of the 

 drainage water over a period of years. Lawes and Gilbert were fortunate 

 in the men to whom they entrusted the undertaking. The analytical 

 work was done between 1877 and 1885 by the late Robert Warington, 

 and from January, 1888, to 1916 by the late N. H. J. Miller, while the 



' For their side of this controversy see J. B. Lawes and J. H. Gilbert, "On Agricultural 

 Chemistry," Journ. Roy. Agric. Hoc, IS5I, 12, 1. 



2 British Assoc. Reports, 1854. As will be shown later on, even this figure is twice what 

 it should be. 



' Now that our French friends have recovered Bechelbronn we hope it will be found 

 possible to commemorate in some adequate manner the important work carried out on 

 this farm by Boussingault in laying the foundations of modern agricultural chemistry. 



« Journ. Roy. Agric. Soc., IS.^G, 17, 123. ()18. 



