The Prog7^ess of Scientific Agriculture. 435 



the land more raj^iclly into a mucli higher state of cultiva- 

 tion.^ 



But while farmers were thus expending their spare capital 

 in the purchase of mineral manures, there was the same 

 strange negligence that we see to-day, in ignoring those fer- 

 tilising agents which were ready to hand in and about the 

 holding. Liebig had shown how by the proper use of the 

 ashes of wild plants, the waste going on in the cultivated fields 

 might be counteracted. There were farmers who took pains 

 to make compost heaps of the sods and weeds of the hedgerow 

 and lane side, but allowed the liquid products of the manure- 

 heap to run waste in the ditches. Some were so imbued with 

 the spirit of Naaman that when Liebig told them to do some 

 great thing they did it, and when he gave them a piece of 

 advice which cost them neither money nor trouble to carry 

 out, they omitted to follow it. Caird in 1852 points out the 

 same phenomenal practices.^ There were cowkeepers in the 

 subm'bs of Birmingham treasuring up the solid manure of the 

 stall to sell to the farmers, while the as valuable constituents 

 of their ashpits were washed away into the sewers ; and in his 

 preface ^ to the famous Times' Letters he deplores that immense 

 mass of fertilising matter which ran (and runs) to waste from 

 all the large towns of the kingdom. 



- It was a pity that just when a central authority was most 

 needed to act as a medium between the laboratory and the 

 field, the only body of this description ceased' to exist. In 

 1819 the Board of Agriculture was abolished, and it was not 

 till 1838 that the Royal Agricultural Society assumed most 

 of the defunct Institution's duties, and advertised its purpose 

 by adopting the admirable motto, "Science with Practice." 

 Its annual shows were immediately patronised by all our 

 leading livestock breeders, and visited by husbandmen from all 

 parts of the civilised world. Pusey, Morton, Lawes, and Gilbert 



' Report to the B.A.S.E. on the Agriculture of Norfolk. Prize Essay, 

 R. W. Bacon, 1844. '• Teathe " is the Norfolk term for the droppings of 

 the sheep. 



* Caird 's English Agriculture, letter xxvii. Warwick, p. 228. 



3 Id. Ibid. Preface. 



