JAPANESE HUSBANDRY. 363 



pursues exactly the same system of husbandry as any other peasant 

 in any other part of the empire ; but it is a matter of perfect in- 

 difference where the young agriculturist learns his business. The 

 young pupil in husbandry will always be able to master a certain 

 small amount of information which the experience of ages has 

 shown to be true, so that it may be looked upon as positive knowl- 

 edge, and a sort of hereditary heirloom. 



I must confess that I experienced a feeling of deep humiliation 

 on many occasions, when with this simple knowledge, and the safe 

 and uncontented practical application of it in husbandry before my 

 eyes, I thought of home. We boast that we are a civilized nation ; 

 in our land men of the highest intellectual attainments devote 

 their best energy to the improvement of agriculture; we have- 

 everywhere agricultural institutions and agricultural societies, 

 chemical laboratories and model farms, to increase and diffuse the 

 knowledge of husbandry. And yet how strange that, despite all 

 this, we still go on disputing, often so vehemently and acrimo- 

 niously, about the first and most simple scientific principles of agri- 

 culture ; and that those who earnestly search after truth are forced 

 to admit the infinite smallness of their positive and undisputed 

 knowledge ! How strange also that even this trifling amount of 

 positive knowledge has as yet found so little application in prac- 

 tice! 



Among the great questions which still remain in dispute with 

 us, whilst in Japan they have long since been settled in the labo- 

 ratory of an experience extending over thousands of years, I must 

 mention as the most important of all, that of manuring. The edu- 

 cated sensible farmer of the old world, who has insensibly come 

 to look upon England, with its .meadows, its enormous fodder 

 production and immense herds of cattle, and in spite of these with 

 its great consumption of guano, ground bones, and rape-cake, as 

 the beau ideal and the only possible type of a truly rational sys- 

 tem of husbandry, would certainly think it a most surprising cir- 

 cumstance to see a country even much better cultivated, without 

 meadows, without fodder production, and even without a single 

 head of cattle, either for draught or for fattening, and without the 

 least supply of guano, ground bones, saltpetre, or rape-cake. This 

 is Japan. 



I cannot help smiling when I remember how, on my passing 

 through England, one of the great leaders of agriculture in that 

 country, pointing to his abundant stock of cattle, endeavoured with 

 an authoritative air to impress upon my mind the following ax- 

 ioms, as the great secret of true wisdom: 'The more fodder, the 

 more flesh ; the more flesh, the more manure ; the more manure, 

 the more grain ! ' The Japanese peasant knows nothing of this 

 chain of conclusions; he simply holds fast to one indisputable 

 axiom, viz. without continuous manuring there can be no continut 

 ous production. A small portion of what I take from the soil is 



