34 AN AGRICULTURAL FAGGOT. 



following forty years, to come no later, there were pub- 

 lished as many as 104 separate papers and memoirs, 

 will sufficiently justify my hesitation. 



Contemporaneous with the foundation of Rothamsted 

 as an agricultural experiment station, the address by 

 Baron Liebig to the British Association, in 1840, on 

 " Chemistry in its Relation to Agriculture and Physio- 

 logy," materially assisted in directing attention to the 

 importance of scientific discoveries to the cultivation of 

 the soil. 



One immediate result was a great stimulus to the use of 

 artificial fertilisers. Bones had been used as a fertiliser 

 since 1774, but it was not until 1840 that guano was 

 introduced. In 1842, Sir John Lawes introduced super- 

 phosphate. Nitrate of soda was first imported from 

 Chili as far back as 1830, but it was some time before it 

 came into general use. Sulphate of ammonia, a sub- 

 stance which is obtained as a by-product in the manu- 

 facture of coal-gas and in some other industries, was 

 introduced, I believe, about 1851, and basic slag about 

 fifteen years ago. 



I should be afraid to guess how many millions of money 

 have been put into the land in the form of artificial 

 manures, and still more fearful of speculating how many 

 of them have been recovered. In the chronicles of agri- 

 culture, we seldom nowadays meet with the phrase 

 ' high farming," which peppered the pages of Wren 

 Hoskyns and Mechi, and other writers of thirty or forty 

 years ago. But if " high farming " in the old sense has 

 gone, or been forced, out of fashion, I fancy that artificial 

 manures have settled down, so to speak, more into 

 their proper place as valuable aids to agriculture than 

 when in their earlier days enthusiasts appear to have 

 anticipated that they would establish an agricultural 

 millennium. 



Geology has contributed much, and botany even more, 

 to agricultural progress, but I am inclined to think that 



