i8 



the yields obtained from the different soils and the various 

 crops. Too often the student of agriculture is inclined to 

 neglect the lessons taught by wide everyday experience, for- 

 getting that the real experimental ground, the greatest labo- 

 ratory for agriculture, is in the infinite variety of fields, crops, 

 climates, seasons, in which the practical farming of the world 

 is carried on. Daily experience and practice often teach what 

 remains a sealed book to those who study only in laboratories 

 and libraries. The opinion of a hundred country-folk may 

 be well worth that of a single academician : wrote an emi- 

 nent French chemist and agriculturist: 



The intuition of humble and unknown experimentors has 

 often given rise to admirable systems of cultivation. Practical 

 farmers, whose names are forgotten, found out some of those effi- 

 cient means for protecting crops from disease and injury which 

 the laboratories have only been able to study and endorse late 

 in the day. Along a sandy track of the Atlantic Coast of 

 Spain, which stretches from the mouth of the Guadalquivir 

 towards Cadiz, prosperous market-gardens have grown up, 

 out of what were formerly sterile and deserted wastes. No 

 laboratory has ever taught such a valuable lesson on sand- 

 culture. These navazos of Spain offer an example which 

 might well be imitated in both the old and the new world, 

 in many a sterile and deserted coast-land. 



" Experience and imitation are the two paths marked out 

 " by Nature for husbandry. Much did the ancients establish 

 " by experiment: much have their descendants done by 

 " imitation. We should do both the one and the other : imi- 

 " tate the old, and, by experimenting, try the new, governed 

 " not by chance, but by reason ". 



By these words of M. Terentius Varro, twenty centuries 

 ago, Ancient Rome taught the fundamental ideas of true 

 husbandry, indeed, of all agricultural and scientific progress. 

 They may well be taken as a text to-day: now that, by collecting 

 and coordinating agricultural knowledge and experience from 

 all parts of the world, an effort is being made in Modern Rome 

 to bring the agriculture of many nations into fruitful contact. 



Rome, Sept. 1910. ITALQ QlGLIOLI. 



