There is no Bad Land 35 



not work in Germany. The German Govern- 

 ment would have the decency to hang its 

 officials. 



Returning after my month of science in Dublin 

 able to see everything with a new eye, I went 

 carefully over the five-acre plot of five " fields," 

 and found three divisions of botanical habitat, as 

 distinct as if they had belonged to different 

 latitudes in different continents or to the differen- 

 tiated altitudes of a mountain five miles high. 

 There was the patch of impoverished upland, dry 

 enough, yet sour, with sorrel taking supreme 

 possession ; the skirts of waterlogged clay, grey 

 with a species of stunted sedge, which seemed 

 never to change either its quantity of its colour 

 with any season of the year ; and then the bog- 

 track, with banks of heather and with open pools 

 holding water under a green scum at mid-summer. 

 Fertility implied a different treatment for each 

 division, and, to complicate the necessity, all three 

 divisions ran in and out among each other. What 

 I have said above about artificial manures and 

 their different application will apply again here, 

 but there was much to do before manuring, 

 because manure may be lost without oxygen in 

 the soil, and because the required air is excluded 

 by excess of water. The whole area looks now as 

 if of uniform quality. It is only a plot of five 

 acres, but, for purposes of demonstrating the 

 needs and means of economic reclamation, it is 

 big enough to put nearly half of Ireland -inside its 

 four fences 



