THE PRODUCTION OF HALOIDS FROM PURE MATERIALS. 341 



The Production of Haloids from Pure Materials. — Peport of a Com- 

 mittee, consisting 0/ Professor H. E. Armstrong, F.P.8., Professor 

 Wyndham R. Dunstan, F.B.8., Mr. 0. H. Bothamley, and Mr. 

 W. A. Shenstone {Secretary). 



The work of the Committee has been actively continued during a con- 

 sidei-able part of the past year. 



The various preliminary difficulties involved in the preparation of 

 pure materials, and especially of chlorine, have now been largely over- 

 come, and it is anticipated that considerable progress will be made during 

 the coming year in investigating the behaviour of highly purified chlorine, 

 and the Committee ask to be reappointed for this purpose. 



A considerable part of the grant made to meet expenses already 

 incurred in 1894 remains in hand, and therefore it is not necessary to ask 

 for a further grant this year. 



How shall Agriculture lest obtain the Help of Science? By R. 

 Warington, M.A., F.K.S., Professor of Rural Economy, Oxford. 



[Ordered by the General Committee to be printed in extenso.l 



Our discussion to-day will, I trust, have practical results. The time is 

 certainly ripe for decided steps being taken. No doubt exists in the 

 mind of any one that British agriculture is in great need of some powerful 

 helping hand, which, in popular phraseology, shall 'put it on its legs 

 again.' There is probably also no doubt in the mind of any person in 

 this room that, if the farmer is to be enabled to do his best, agriculture 

 must be advanced from its original condition as an art, and that in future 

 its operations must be conducted with the full assistance of natural 

 science. The so-called ' practical man ' may indeed believe that the 

 question we have met to discuss will be at once set aside as profitless if 

 we raise the preliminary question, Do you believe that the assistance of 

 natural science will remove agricultural depression? I answer at once 

 that I do not know that it will, but that this is no reason for declining 

 the aid which science offers. When a sick man calls in a physician he 

 does not ask the preliminary question, Do you promise to restore me to 

 full health ? If the question were asked, the physician would positively 

 decline to make any such promise ; and yet the sick man would place 

 himself unreservedly in the physician's hands, feeling that he could 

 not do better than make use of the best knowledge of the day on the 

 subject of his complaint. Now agricultural science should mean the 

 best knowledge of the day on the subject of agriculture, and a farmer 

 will surely do wisely to obtain the aid of this knowledge in all his 

 operations. 



We have now to consider in what manner, by what methods, agricul- 

 ture may best obtain the aid of science. We might divide our answer to 

 this question into two parts. We might say, in the first place, that the 

 science of agriculture is still only in its infancy, and that if agriculture is 



