158 THE SPIRIT OF THE SOIL 



show that this is a general opinion I have thought it 

 desirable to quote here a couple of the views to 

 which experts have given expression during the 

 last two years, and also to quote the views of several 

 leading newspapers. 



At a large meeting held early in 1914 at the Royal 

 Society of Arts, Professor Keeble, F.R.S., who was 

 in the chair, opened the discussion, and said "he 

 could put it that Professor Bottomley was able to 

 take material of small commercial value, used 

 mainly for the making of fuel and oil, and extract 

 from it not only the humates in a form in which 

 they could be used for plants, but also to use these 

 humates as a seed bed in which the Azotobacter, a 

 Nitrogen-fixing organism, could thrive. If more 

 extended trials than those so far undertaken could 

 establish that Professor Bottomley could do these 

 two things, he would have earned the encomium of 

 Swift for those who made two blades of grass grow 

 where one grew before/' 



Dr. O. Rosenheim said "he believed that bacterized 

 peat was a substance having remarkable properties 

 as a stimulant to growth. He had himself carried 

 out a few experiments for the purpose of investi- 

 gating the minimum quantity of the peat which 

 would produce the results which Professor Bot- 

 tomley had shown; the quantity proved to be very 

 small indeed. He had found that a solution pre- 

 pared from the peat, containing only about 30 milli- 

 grammes of solid substances, produced striking 

 results on plant growth. His results showed that the 

 effect of peat was out of all proportion to what 





