ADDRESS. ] 5 



number of inhabitants, and we have the startling fact that, in the United 

 Kingdom, we are content to hurry down our drains and water courses, 

 into the sea, fixed nitrogen to the value of no less than 16,000,000?. per 

 annum. This unspeakable waste continues, and no effective and universal 

 method is yet contrived of converting sewage into corn. Of this barbaric 

 waste of manurial constituents Liebig, nearly half a century ago, wrote 

 in these prophetic words : ' Nothing will more certainly consummate the 

 ruin of England than a scarcity of fertilisers — it means a scarcity of food. 

 It is impossible that such a sinful violation of the divine laws of Nature 

 should for ever remain unpunished ; and the time will probably come for 

 England sooner than for any other country, when, with all her wealth in 

 gold, iron, and coal, she will be unable to buy one-thousandth part of 

 the food which she has, during hundreds of years, thrown recklessly 

 away.' 



The more widely this wasteful system is extended, recklessly returning 

 to the sea what we have taken from the land, the more surely and quickly 

 will the finite stocks of nitrogen locked up in the soils of the world become 

 exhausted. Let us remember that the plant creates nothing ; there is 

 nothing in bread which is not absorbed from the soil, and unless the 

 abstracted nitrogen is returned to the soil, its fertility must ultimately be 

 exhausted. When we apply to the land nitrate of soda, sulphate of am- 

 monia, or guano, we are drawing on the earth's capital, and our drafts 

 will not perpetually be honoured. Already we see that a vircrin soil 

 cropped for several yeai's loses its productive powers, and without artificial 

 aid becomes infertile. Thus the strain to meet demands is increasingly 

 great. Witness the yield of forty bushels of wheat per acre under 

 favourable conditions, dwindling through exhaustion of soil to less than 

 seven bushels of poor grain, and the urgency of husbanding the limited 

 store of fixed nitrogen becomes apparent. The store of nitrogen in the 

 atmosphere is practically unlimited, but it is fixed and x'endered assimilable 

 by plants only by cosmic processes of extreme slowness. The nitrogen 

 which with a light heart we liberate in a battleship broadside, has taken 

 millions of minute organisms patiently working for centuries to win from 

 the atmosphere.' 



The only available compound containing sufficient fixed nitrogen to be 

 used on a world-wide scale as a nitrogenous manure is nitrate of soda, or 

 Chili saltpetre. This substance occurs native over a narrow band of the 

 plain of Tamarugal, in the northern provinces of Chili between the Andes 

 and the coast hills. In this rainless district for countless aaes the con- 

 tinuous fixation of atmospheric nitrogen by the soil, its conversion into 

 nitrate by the slow transformation of billions of nitrifying organisms, its 

 combination with soda, and the crystallisation of the nitrate have been 

 steadily proceeding, until the nitrate fields of Chili have become of vast 

 commercial importance, and promise to be of inestimably greater value in 



' Appendix N. 



