If it answers to these characters, it may fairly be assumed that 

 the material is good enough to safely apply to most of the land in 

 Assam. Such are some of the soils in which the following determina- 

 tions of Nitrogen and Organic Matter have been made: 



In this connection there is one practice which, from an economi- 

 cal point of view, one cannot condemn too strongly, This is that 

 of top-dressing from a hullah, and then again using the material of 

 the same hullah for top-dressing again three or four years later. 

 In the meanwhile there has not been sufficient time for a new layer 

 of vegetable soil to form, and the practice merely consists of putting 

 on little more than a layer of subsoil of little manurial value, and 

 certainly not worth the thirty to forty rupees per acre that the 

 application would cost. The following are the partial analyses of 

 some'of these hullahs, which it was suggested to use for top-dressing, 

 but which had been used three or four years before : 



In each of the above cases the soil was poorer than that on 

 which it was intended to put it and so money spent on this busi- 

 ness would have been almost entirely lost. Even under the most 

 favourable conditions, such as those of the Brahmaputra Company, 

 where the hullahs are fed annually with rich river silt, as well as the 



