88 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [PuIk Doc. 



ingredients ; but Dr. Jenkins, his great disciple and scholar, 

 has been for two years or more carrying on most inter- 

 esting experiments along the line of special fertilizers in 

 raising tomatoes and lettuce. Professor Jordan will tell 

 you, however, that these experiments are conducted on 

 artificial soil, made up of coal ashes and peat ; but Pro- 

 fessor Jenkins is using special mixtures, based upon the 

 analysis of the tomatoes and lettuce, and he is getting 

 abundant and splendid results. 



I want to put this question to every farmer here to-day. 

 When you leave this hall, what do you propose to use as 

 a fertilizer, what do you propose to buy? If you buy a 

 mixed fertilizer, shall it be a special one or some hap- 

 hazard one, based upon an arbitrary standard? Or, if you 

 buy the raw ingredients, how will you mix them, with 

 reference to your soil? Do you know anything about it? 

 Or with reference to the crop, of which there have been 

 thousands of analyses which are at your service ? I repeat 

 again, Where are you at? 



My quarrel with the directors and the doctors is that 

 they do not give us a standard. When you are sick, you 

 call in a physician. He looks you all over, appearing very 

 wise, and finally says, "I think your system is strong 

 enough to carry you through all right without anything," 

 but you keep growing worse. Then he begins to experi- 

 ment with you, trying first this thing and then that, until 

 you get disgusted and dismiss him. Then you send for 

 a physician of experience and sense, and he follows out a 

 line of treatment founded ujwn well-established laws and 

 experience ; that is, some standards which have grown out 

 of studying the living person, and not his dead and inert 

 environments, although these to a certain extent are taken 

 into account. If the professors or some of them will not 

 take the living plant as their standard, then find something 

 that we can adopt. Don't let us flounder any longer. We 

 pay these State chemists handsomely. The fertilizer man- 

 ufiicturers, as well as the farmers, are taxed for the support 

 of inspection ; and we therefore have a right to expect from 

 them some system, some plan, that shall be safe, econom- 

 ical and successful,— some system of plant feeding that 



