Agriculture and Chemistry. 291 
ing crops took away from it, and so to supersede the lime, 
the marl, the bones, the guano, the rape-dust, which farmers 
had thought to be pretty good kinds of things, not to speak 
of the ill-used muck of former times. The patent was ob- 
tained; but, alas for the vanity of human hopes! the patent 
manure was laughed at in its own country, and found to be 
of little more use in this than the same quantity of sawdust. 
It was the fruitful mother, however, of an infinite number of 
infallible manures, each to have its day of infallibility, and 
then to be forgotten. The trade prospered, and has conti- 
nued, though now somewhat on the wane, to the present 
time. The farmers had, fortunately for themselves, got 
guano in abundance, and which, though no more a chemical 
discovery than the muck of their forefathers, was found to 
be tolerably efficient for their purpose; and the farmers really 
prospered, notwithstanding the frequent failures of the infal- 
lible fertilisers presented to them on every hand. 
But this was not all: the soil was to be analysed, and no 
farmer was to presume to fancy that he could cultivate it 
until an agricultural chemist told him what it consisted of. 
Analyses of soils accordingly prospered, the farmers received 
and paid for the documents, with wonderfully little profit, it 
may be believed, to the soils themselves. The Government 
of the time was solicited by two great agricultural societies 
—one in England and one in Scotland—to make a grant of 
money from the then not very thriving Exchequer, for getting 
all the soils of the kingdom at once analysed. Government, 
it is believed, was rather anxious to oblige so many influen- 
tial applicants, and commence the great work of analysing 
all the soils of Great Britain. Lord Althorpe, however, then 
Chancellor of the Exchequer, resolved, contrary to the usual 
precedent, to consult first some persons who might chance to 
know something about the matter. He learned that to ana- 
lyse a// the soils of the country was a hopeless affair, even 
with the help of an army of chemists; that to analyse any 
great number of them would probably require a century or 
so; that the work would need to be begun again and again, 
whenever a soil was changed by improvements made upon 
it; that the analysis of a soil was not quite such a simple 
