388 APPENDIX G. 



periodical press to spread the teachings of science. The son 

 simply learns from the father ; and as the father knows quite as 

 much as his grandfather and great grandfather before him, so 

 he pursues exactly the same system of husbandry as any other 

 peasant in any other part of the empire ; it is a matter of 

 perfect indifference where the young agriculturist learns his 

 business. The young pupil in husbandry will always be able to 

 master a certain small amount of information which the expe- 

 rience of ages has shown to be true, so that it may be looked 

 upon as positive knowledge, and a sort of hereditary heirloom. 



I must confess that I experienced a feeling of deep humilia- 

 tion on many occasions, when with this simple knowledge, and 

 the safe and uncontested practical application of it in hus- 

 bandry before my eyes, I thought of home. We boast that we 

 are a civilised nation ; in our land men of the highest intellectual 

 attainments devote their best energy to the improvement of 

 agriculture ; we have everywhere agricultural institutions and 

 agricultural societies, chemical laboratories and model farms, to 

 increase and diffuse the knowledge of husbandry. And yet how 

 strange that, despite all this, we still go on disputing, often so 

 vehemently and acrimoniously, about the first and most simple 

 scientific principles of agriculture ; and that those who earnestly 

 search after truth are forced to admit the infinite smallness of 

 their positive and undisputed knowledge ! How strange also 

 that even this trifling amount of positive knowledge has as yet 

 found so little application in practice ! 



Among the great questions which still remain in dispute with 

 us, whilst in Japan they have long since been settled in the 

 laboratory of an experience extending over thousands of years, 

 I must mention as the most important of all, that of manuring. 

 The educated sensible farmer of the old world, who has in- 

 sensibly come to look upon England, with its meadows, its enor- 

 mous fodder production and immense herds of cattle, and in 

 spite of these with its great consumption of guano, ground 

 bones, and rape-cake, as the beau ideal and the only possible 

 type of a truly rational system of husbandry, would certainly 

 think it a most surprising circumstance to see a country even 

 much better cultivated, mthout meadows, without fodder pro- 

 duction, and even without a single head of cattle, either for 



