No. 4.] EXPERIMENTS WITH CORN.- 177 



corn, coru, oats, hay, hay, corn, rye, soy beans, white mustard 

 (plowed in), corn, corn, hay, hay, and corn. The crops especially 

 benefited by potash are corn, clover and soy beans ; those espe- 

 cially benefited by the nitrate are oats and grass ; one has been 

 especially benefited by the bone-black, — mustard. Other experi- 

 ments indicate that cabbages, turnips and rape resemble the 

 mustard in their needs. 



The soil where this corn was grown is a medium loam, 

 not over rich. It, however, has good natural characteris- 

 tics. It holds water sufficiently, and not too much. It is 

 not likely to suffer from excessive wetness ; on the other 

 hand, it does not suffer ver}^ badly from quite a severe 

 drought. It is naturally pretty good land, so far as tex- 

 ture is concerned. It was in pretty fair condition when we 

 commenced with the fertilizer. At the time we begfan, we 

 raised without manure or fertilizer about 25 bushels of 

 shelled corn to the acre. We planned the experiment not 

 to see how big crops we could grow, but solely with refer- 

 ence to throwing some light on the general question of what 

 different crops need on that soil, — what elements they 

 would need to make them grow, — and it was solely with 

 reference to that point that we selected the materials we 

 would use. I do not believe that nitrate of soda is neces- 

 sarilj^ the best thing to use for nitrogen, nor that dissolved 

 bone-black is necessarily the form of phosphate which you 

 always ought to buy, nor that muriate of potash is always 

 the best potash. We took these three because they give 

 good results, and because they can always l)c depended upon 

 and are always quite uniform. Nitrate of soda can always 

 be depended upon to contain about the same percentage of 

 nitrogen, the bone-black always contains just so much 

 phosphoric acid, and the muriate of potash runs pretty even 

 in the percentage of potash it contains. What we tried to 

 do was to see the influence of the nitrate of soda, of the 

 bone-black and of the muriate of potash on the different 

 crops we grew on that field. We grew corn in 1889 and 

 again in 1890 ; then we had oats, and sowed grass and 

 clover with the oats. We cut four crops — two each 

 year — in 1892 and 1893. In 1894 we grew corn; in 



