24 



ing that, after all, perhaps they do get it somehow. Microbes 

 seem to be working over the stores of inert nitrogen, and clover 

 may favor the action of microbes. 



There is at present a decided tendency to accept the doctrine 

 that some plants do gather nitrogen from the air. If this doctrine 

 is true, we may, when guano and nitrate of soda are gone, use 

 clover to obtain a supply of nitrogen. 



I was much struck the other day by a forcible remark of a 

 friend, who, in speaking of farmers' clubs and the men who support 

 them, said, " Where there is one man talking in the meeting, 

 there are a hundred busily thinking at home." The fact is, that 

 we are in the midst of an awakening of agricultural thought that 

 is really phenomenal. With the thinking come improvement, 

 better tillage, better crops, better stock and better profits, and, 

 what is best of all, a higher intellectual, and, I trust, moral life. 

 The agencies that speed this movement, the forms of nutriment on 

 which it thrives, are manifold. The future welfare of our race, 

 material, intellectual and moral, depends upon the food supply, 

 or, in other words, upon the products of the soil. This in turn 

 reduces itself to a question of the supply of phosphoric acid, 

 potash and nitrogen. Enough of the first two for indefinite time 

 to come is assured in the deposits of phosphates and potash salts 

 already discovered. But the supply of the nitrogen is still in 

 question. • This costliest of the fertilizing elements escapes from 

 our soils into the air and into the sea, and is taken away by crops, 

 and not completely returned. The artificial supplies in commercial 

 fertilizers promise to meet but a small fraction of the coming 

 demand. If, as some are inclined to believe, the exhaustless 

 stores of the atmosphere are not available to plants, the outlook is 

 dark enough. But if the farmer may use his plants to gather it 

 without money and without price, we may dismiss our solicitude. 

 With the assurance that plants obtain nitrogen from the air, the 

 dismal doctrine of Malthus, which prophesies starvation for the 

 over-populated earth of the future, may, with other kindred forms 

 of pessimism, be happily ignored. That the research of the future 

 will bring the brighter answer to this problem, there seems to me 

 to be most excellent ground to hope. 



