208 BOAED OF AGRICULTUEE. 



(threshers' measure), that weighed 40 pounds to the bushel, 

 giving a yield per acre of 57 bushels of 32 pounds each. 

 The land was given 60 pounds of nitrogen, 100 pounds of 

 phosphoric acid and 300 pounds of salt per acre ; no potash 

 at all. The potash, however, had been applied in the four 

 previous years in more abundant quantity than the alternate 

 crops of potatoes and grass had taken out. Now one experi- 

 ment does not establish a rule, and I am therefore not pre- 

 pared to recommend the application of salt to the oat crop. 

 Oats, like asparagus and tobacco, are ghittonous feeders. 

 Planted on a rich soil in a favorable season, or given ample 

 nitrogen, phosphoric acid and potash, they will grow so 

 rankly that unless something is present to stiffen the straw, 

 the crop will lodge and be ruined. My crop had more nitro- 

 gen and phosphoric acid than was needed, and enough 

 potash. The season was ftivorable, and the crop would un- 

 doubtedly have lodged, as it did in some places where the 

 salt was not applied, had it not been for the presence of the 

 soda or possibly of the chlorine also, both of which the salt 

 contained. The precise office of chlorine and soda in agri- 

 cultural chemistry is not fully known, but I feel, from my 

 own experience and that of others with whom I have con- 

 versed, that the* application of soda, either in the form of 

 common salt or of nitrate of soda, can be advantageously 

 applied to any greedy crop which is predisposed to lodge 

 when planted on a rich soil, or one that is over-fertilized. 

 The oat is plainly such a crop, and is about the only one 

 growing in this section to which it seems advisable to apply 

 soda in any form. 



Under the head of " Functions of the Ash Ingredients," 

 in "How Crops Grow," Johnson says: " The albuminoids, 

 which contain sulphur as an essential ingredient, obviously 

 cannot be produced in absence of sulphuric acid, which, so 

 far as we know, is the single source of sulphur to plants. 

 The sulphurized oils of the onion, mustard, horse-radish, 

 turnip, etc., likewise require sulphates for their organization. 

 . . . The organic acids, oxalic, malic, tartaric, citric, etc., 

 require alkalies and alkali-earths to form the salts which 

 exist in plants, i. e., bi-tartrate of potash in the grape, 

 oxalate of lime in beet leaves, malate of lime in tobacco ; 



