22 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



very same year the new " mineral " theory and the new 

 " nitrogen " theory took birth, in the place of the thenceforth 

 discredited " humus " theory. However, German farmers, 

 moving on in their old humdrum way and, like most of 

 our own in the present day, recking little of chemistry, for 

 a long time took no notice of the epoch-making discoveries. 

 Late in the 'fifties their agricultural chemists still pub- 

 licly scolded them for permitting their valuable German 

 bones — that is, the bones of their animals — to be unpatrioti- 

 cally exported wholesale to our shores, there to enrich 

 British fields. German oilcake likewise came over to us 

 by shiploads. If the late Colonel Sampson, of Buxshalls 

 Park in Sussex, told us true — which I do not for a moment 

 doubt : only I want to name my authority for the grue- 

 some story — at one of our agricultural dinners, our 

 farmers in their appreciation of superphosphate did ] ot 

 even disdain to employ the bones of departed heroes — I 

 hope they were not all our own — brought home from the 

 Crimea, as manure. With the employment of these two 

 classes of fertilisers — nitrogen and phosphates, for potash 

 salts were then not yet unearthed — began our " golden 

 age " of high farming, which at once showed capital results, 

 and rumours of which rapidly spread into Germany, 



However, what " fetched " German agriculturists most 

 was the fact — clearly demonstrated by Professor J. A. 

 Stockhardt, a very eminent agricultural chemist, whom 

 I have seen, in 1856, anticipating in his laboratory at 

 Tharand the experiments with which, many years after- 

 wards, the Frenchman M. Ville gained great renown in 

 this country — that, as Mr. Prothero has since likewise 

 shown in his admirable " English Farming, Past and 

 Present," it was after the repeal of the Corn Laws — which, 

 it had been feared, would wreck our Agriculture — that our 

 Agriculture had, on the contrary, taken its great bound 

 upward. It was our farmers being put upon their mettle 

 by what seemed to them a severe visitation which led 

 them into their " golden age." That was, in truth, but 

 a repetition, in principle, of an earlier experience, when, 

 as Mr. Prothero relates, Lord Townshend and " Coke of 



