The Progress of Scientific Agriculture. 433 



composition of the plant intended to be grown therein, he 

 would be able to supply out of the constituents of his laboratory 

 the required fertiliser. Henceforth the market-ordinary and 

 the farmers' club of every small county-town became the 

 theatre of animated discussion on the virtues of stercoration. 

 The portable manures manufactured in the Giessen laboratory 

 were used throughout this country, and gave a strong forward 

 impetus to all forms of English agriculture. 



There is a story, which if not true, ought to be, that a 

 modern English composer received such a shock to his 

 patriotism by hearing the street boys whistle tunes from 

 Offenbach's operas, that he determined to go home and devote 

 his genius to the production of popular music. Something of 

 the same feeling possibly agitated the minds of the Rothamsted 

 chemists when they discovered that German manures had 

 begun to flood the English markets. Liebig's celebrated 

 mineral wheat fertiliser was tried and proved a failure, 

 whereupon Lawes and Gilbert began a series of invaluable 

 experiments which have lasted to the present day. These 

 gradually tended to prove that, though the vegetation of 

 nature can proceed, and to a certain extent luxuriate, without 

 the aid of man, it is not so in the case of those abnormal 

 crops required in high farming. The organic as well as the 

 inorganic, or (as Liebig afterwards termed them) the atmo- 

 spheric as well as the terrestrial constituents of vegetable life, 

 require artificial assistance before they can be carried to per- 

 fection ; and therefore Liebig had committed a grave error 

 when he counselled the farmer to ignore the sources whence 

 he could obtain a supply of ammonia and nitric acid for re- 

 nitrogenising an exhausted seed-bed. Indeed, it would seem 

 that he himself indirectly admitted his mistake when he after- 

 wards contended that ammonia itself, being a mineral substance, 

 was originally included amongst those terrestrial constituents 

 of plant life which he had shown to be capable of ex- 

 haustion.^ 



^ The problem still remains how that vast reservoii* of nitrogen— four- 

 fifths of the entire atmosphere — can be utilised so as to save the costly 

 purchase of nitrogenous manures. We have learned that, owing to the 



n. F F 



