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their positive and undisputed knowledge ! How 

 strange, also, that even this trifling amount of 

 positive knowledge has as yet found so little 

 application in practice ! 



Among the great questions which still remain 

 in dispute with us (whilst in Japan they have long 

 since been settled in the laboratory of an experience 

 extending over thousands of years), I must men- 

 tion, as the most important of all, that of manuring. 



The educated sensible farmer of the old world, 

 who has unconsciously come to look upon England, 

 with its meadows, its enormous fodder production, 

 and immense herds of cattle, and withal its great 

 consumption of guano, ground bones, and rape-cake, 

 as the beau ideal and the only possible type of a 

 truly rational system of husbandry, would certain- 

 ly be considerably surprised to see a country 

 much better cultivated, without the advantages 

 of meadows, fodder production, or even a single 

 head of cattle, either for draught or for fattening, 

 and without the least supply of guano, ground 

 bones, saltpetre, or rape-cake. This is Japan. 



I cannot refrain from a smile when I remember 

 how, on my passing through England, one of the 

 chief leaders of agriculture in that country, pointing 

 to his abundant stock of cattle, endeavoured with 

 an assuming air to impress upon my mind the 

 following axioms as the great secret of true wisdom : 



4 The more fodder, the more flesh ; the more 

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