No. 4.] SOIL FERTILITY. 133 



from one to four acres. The package can be carried in your 

 pocket, and yet does more work than several cartloads of fer- 

 tilizer. It costs the government less than four cents a cake, 

 or less than a cent an acre, and saves the farmer thirty or 

 forty dollars, which he would have to spend for an equal 

 amount of fertilizer." "If Malthus were living, he would 

 have to revise his calculation of the time when the w orld 

 will be so crammed with people that it cannot feed them." 

 Mention is made of a Maryland farmer who inoculated an 

 alfalfa field with marked benefit to the crop, — an experience 

 in nowise unique at the present time ; but note the com- 

 ments : ' This Maryland farmer had formerly been able to 

 cultivate only one-third of his land ; he had been obliged 

 to abandon two-thirds because of the hopelessness of getting 

 anything from it. Xow, at no expense to himself and at 

 trivial amount of laljor, he had reclaimed the worthless two- 

 thirds, and made it more productive than the other third. 

 He has increased the yield of his farm, his income, fivefold ; 

 a generous living is now before him." " Nearly every State 

 has its worn-out farming land, bringing despair to the econo- 

 mist who laments our careless handling of the fields, and 

 who wonders how the country will support the hundreds of 

 millions soon to be ours. The bacteria means intensive 

 cultivation with a vengeance, and should give him hope." 



Such generalizations as these may do for sensational mag- 

 azine writing, in order to inflame the imagination of readers, 

 but they do not fairly represent our present state of knowl- 

 edge as to the practical value of soil inoculation with certain 

 forms of bacteria. The fact probably is that many of the 

 older cultivated lands of this country are thoroughly seeded 

 with those l)acteria Avhich maintain a s^^mbiotic relation to 

 our more common legumes, such as the clovers, beans and 

 peas. If red clover fails on a given piece of land, it is 

 entirely possible, or even probable, that the soil environ- 

 ment is unfavorable to the clover plant, either as to food, 

 root distribution or in some other particular. The improve- 

 ment of the clover crop in such cases will not be brought 

 about by adding more bacteria to those already present in 

 the soil, l)ut by improving the soil conditions through tillage, 



