232 Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 



Council in 1848, and was afterwards a vice-president and trustee. In 

 1893 the presidency of the Society was offered to him, but declined on 

 account of his advancing years. In the Journal of the Society the 

 greater number of the reports on the Rothamsted agricultural investi- 

 gations have been published ; forty-six reports had thus appeared before 

 the year 1900. In 1876 he took an active part in arranging for the 

 commencement of the field experiments conducted by the Society at 

 Woburn, in Bedfordshire. These experiments consisted in repetitions 

 of the experiments at Rothamsted upon the continuous growth of 

 wheat and barley with known manures, the experiments, in this case, 

 being made upon a purely sandy soil; they also included rotation 

 experiments designed to test the manurial value of cattle foods. These 

 expeiiments were conducted on the Duke of Bedford's estate, and at his 

 expense. 



The relations of Mr. Lawes with the Chemical Society were also 

 intimate. He became a Fellow in 1850, and was elected to the 

 Council in 1862. The chief part of the chemical work done in the 

 Rothamsted laboratory was communicated to this Society, and about 

 twenty-two lectures and papers by Lawes and Gilbert, and other 

 Rothamsted workers, appear in the "Journal " and "Transactions.'"' 



Mr. Lawes was a member of the Royal Commission appointed in 

 1857 "To inquire into the best mode of distributing the sewage of 

 towns, and applying it to beneficial and profitable uses." Two members 

 of this Commission, Lawes and Way, conducted for several years im- 

 portant experiments on sewage irrigation at Rugby. The investigation 

 dealt with the quantity and composition of the grass receiving vary- 

 ing amounts of sewage, and its value as' food for fattening oxen and 

 milking cows, including the composition of the milk obtained. The 

 effluent waters from the irrigated fields were also analysed, and the 

 formation of nitrates in large quantities ^vas demonstrated. The final 

 report was published in 1865. 



The aid of Rothamsted was again sought by the Government in 

 1863, the object in this case being to ascertain whether the malting 

 of barley resulted in any increase of its value as a food. A consider- 

 able bulk of barley was divided into two lots, one of which was 

 malted, and the loss in dry matter ascertained ; feeding experiments 

 were then made, in which the nutritive effect of a given weight of 

 barley was compared with that shown by the quantity of malt which 

 could have been produced from it. The trials with oxen, sheep, and 

 pigs, were made at Rothamsted, and those with milking cows at Rugby. 

 The full report was presented to Parliament in 1866. 



While the formal reports on the Rothamsted investigations were to 

 a large extent the work of Dr. Gilbert, Mr. Lawes was himself an active 

 writer on agricultural subjects. In middle life he was a frequent con- 





