136 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



according to such calculations as were then attainable, 

 the money value of the residue of the feeding stuff used, 

 after passing through the animal. All these tables had a 

 certain anount of success. The most successful was the 

 last mentioned, owing to the accident that not long after 

 its appearance, in 1875, Mr. Disraeli brought in his Agri- 

 cultural Holdings Bill, the first of a series which have 

 occupied the attention of Parliament. To arrive at the 

 amount of compensation due to an improving, generously 

 feeding tenant, of course, some such guide as that supplied 

 in my tables was a help. Accordingly a good number of 

 those tables found their way into Westminster Palace, as 

 well as into the laboratories of agricultural chemists. The 

 values shown in those tables no longer hold good. We 

 have learnt a good deal more since they were published 

 about chemical constituents and also about manurial 

 values. Some years ago I prepared a new set of tables, 

 on the same lines, but brought up to date, hoping thereby 

 to render a service to the Agricultural Organisation Society, 

 of the Committee of which I was then still a member. 

 However, evidently my colleagues on the Committee did 

 not share my high appreciation of the value of a knowledge 

 of chemistry, and after a refusal from my colleagues the 

 tables remained unpublished. I cannot, however, help 

 thinking that it is just such ocular tuition as would be 

 given by coloured diagrams, the lines of which tell their 

 own tale at a glance, and the teaching of which is accord- 

 ingly readily assimilated, that is most urgently wanted 

 among our agricultural population, a large part of whom 

 are hkely to remain unmoved by the droning of a lecturer, 

 who may be found to be talking over their heads, and to 

 whom chemical formulas are worse than Greek. 



It is the same with demonstration plots or farms. We 

 have such, and very excellent ones, too. It is in fact we 

 who set the example of them. Rothamsted was the 

 inspirer, not of Thaer's Moglin only, but of all the host of 

 experimental stations now scattered over the German 

 Empire and beyond, the results of which have since about 

 fifty years been eagerly scanned and studied by minds 



