lO THOMAS MACFAELANE: 



Fellenberg on his farm, near Berne, and was described by Meyer-Alteuburg, nearly thirty 

 years ago, in a pamphlet entitled " Ein Pfuud StickstofF kanm einen Groschen," which 

 may be freely rendered, " A pound of nitrogen for a penny." When it is considered that 

 the pound of nitrogen thus saved for two cents, costs, when purchased in fertilisers, at 

 least sixteen, the saving to be made by properly caring for barnyard manure will be 

 apparent. 



While maintaining that the farmer should properly save and ïitilise his barnyard 

 manure before purchasing fertilisers, it is not intended to depreciate these, or to undervalue 

 the results obtained by their use in the " high " or " intensive " farming of other countries. 

 High farming has scarcely begun yet in Canada, but must soon become more general, and 

 then fertilisers will be indispensable. It is, however, open to question as to whether 

 there may not have been, in other countries, waste in the application of these to agricul- 

 ture. It is not easy to ascertain what a soil really requires for a specif\,ed crop ; whether 

 it is deficient in organic mattei', or which of the three great feeders of plants — nitrogen, 

 phosphoric acid, and potash — it would be most advantageous to apply. On this account, 

 recourse is frequently had to a mixed fertiliser which may contain unnecessary constitu- 

 ents for the case in hand, and the application of which may, therefore, be wasteful. The 

 subject is a very wide one, with a voluminous literature, and wide difierences of opinion 

 among its authorities. Since the time when Proctor and Ryland, in Bristol, first carried 

 out Liebig's suggestion to render the jihosphoric acid of bones more readily available by 

 treating them with sulphuric acid, to the present day, when fine-ground Thomas slag is 

 maintained to be the cheapest phq^phatic fertiliser, the most extensive and painstaking 

 field experiments have, on all hands, been made, and an accumulation of experience in 

 the application of fertilisers gained, of which scarcely a fraction has been utilised for the 

 benefit of ordinary farming communities. I can only mention the investigations of 

 Lawes and Grilbert, at Rothhamsted ; of Jamieson, under the Aberdeenshire Agricultural 

 Association ; of Mechi, Lehmann, Grrouven, Fleischer, Monro, Wrightson, Wagner, 

 and a host of others, without attempting to generalise the results of their labors. The 

 vast accumulation of figures from these await rearrangement and simplification, at the 

 hands of a master of the art of agriculture, before they can be made thoroughly available 

 for practical farmers. I cannot, however, avoid making more particular mention of the 

 new system of conducting experiments on manures recently practiced by Professor Paul 

 Wagner of Darmstadt. He calls it the " scientifically exact " method, as distinguished from 

 the " field" method so long in use for making manure trials. Wagner maintains that field 

 experiments have not given, and are not capable of giving, unequivocal results ; that it is 

 not possible to carry them on in sufiicient numbers to obtain these ; that variations in the 

 soil, unfavorable weather and many other influences, all introduce sources of error, and 

 that the dimensions of the area devoted to each trial are too large to admit of exact treat- 

 ment. He insists that in a scientific trial it is essential that the experimentalist should 

 be able to control all the conditions which influence its result, and, therefore, he makes 

 use of cylinders of sheet zinc, 133 centimeters high, by 60 and 100 centimeters in 

 diameter, open above and below, in which to make his trials. These bottomless flower- 

 pots are placed in the ground, the upper lip level with the surface, and filled with the 

 earth selected for making the experiment. The soil enclosed in one of these corresponds 

 to the plot of the field experiment system, differing from it in having a much smaller 



