EVIDENCE OF HISTORY 255 



Rothamsted Station in England. The Roth- 

 amsted Station was established by Sir John 

 Lawes in 1843, and on his death, in 1901, en- 

 dowed in perpetuity by him. 



Associated with him for more than fifty 

 years was Sir Henry Gilbert, a pupil of the 

 great Liebig himself. It is a noteworthy fact 

 that, although the endowment of Rothamsted 

 is made up from a fortune accumulated in the 

 chemical fertilizer industry, Sir John Lawes 

 never permitted his business interests to sway 

 him in the least in his classic undertaking. In 

 fact, at the time of his death he admitted that 

 the most puzzling problem to be solved was 

 the fact that a field of wheat in rotation, never 

 manured since 1848, produced more grain than 

 another field continuously cropped and con- 

 tinuously fertilized for each crop with a "com- 

 plete fertilizer." 



The Bureau of Soils of the Department of 

 Agriculture does not conduct field experi- 

 ments. All its data is drawn from the ex- 

 periments of the state stations and the stations 

 of the Old World. That these American sci- 

 entists should interpret these orthodox ex- 

 periments in the light of a revolutionary 

 theory as sustaining their own theory, in 



