PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 759 
institutions. For my purpose it suffices to state, without going into detail, that 
in practically every county, in one way or other, attempts have been made to 
carry out investigations of problems related to agriculture. 
Twenty years after the voting of the technical instruction grant to the 
County Councils, Parliament has again subsidised agriculture, in the shape of 
the Development Fund, by means of which large sums of money have been 
devoted to what may be broadly called Agricultural Science. It seems to me 
that the advent of this second subsidy is an occasion when this Section may 
well pause to take stock of the results which have been achieved by the expendi- 
ture of the technical education grant. I do not propose to discuss the results 
achieved in the way of education, although most of the technical instruction 
. grant has been spent in that direction. It will be more to the point in addressing 
the Agricultural Section to discuss the results obtained by research. 
The subject, then, of my Address is the result of the last twenty years of 
agricultural research, and I propose to discuss both successes and failures, in 
the hope of arriving at conclusions which may be of use in the future. 
Agricultural Science embraces a variety of subjects. I propose to consider 
first the results which have been obtained by the numerous practical field experi- 
ments which have been carried out in almost every county. I suppose that the 
most striking result of these during the last twenty years is the demonstration 
that in certain cases phosphates are capable of making a very great increase in 
the crop of hay, and a still greater increase in the feeding value of pastures. This 
increase is not yielded in all cases, but the subject has been widely investigated, 
and the advisory staffs of the colleges are in a position to give inquirers reliable 
information as to the probability of success in almost any case which may be 
submitted to them. This is a satisfactory state of things, and the question 
naturally arises : How has it come about? 
On looking through the figures of the numerous reports which have been 
published on this subject, it appears at once that in many cases the increase in 
live-weight of sheep fed on plots manured with a suitable dressing of phosphate 
has been twice as great as the increase in weight of similar animals fed on plots 
to which phosphate has not been applied. Now about a difference of this 
magnitude between two plots there can be no mistake. It has been shown by 
more than one experimenter that two plots treated similarly in every way are as 
likely as not to differ in production from their mean by five per cent. of their 
produce, and this may be taken as the probable error of a single plot. Where, 
as in the case of many of the phosphate experiments, a difference of 100 per cent. 
is recorded, a difference of twenty times the probable error, the chrnces amount 
to a certainty that the difference is not an accidental variation, but a real effect 
of the different treatment of the two plots. The single-plot method of conduct- 
ing field trials, which is the one most commonly used, is evidently a satisfactory 
method of measuring the effects of manures which are capable of producing 
100 per cent. increases. It was good enough to demonstrate with certainty the 
effects of phosphatic manuring on many kinds of grass land, and it is to this fact 
that we owe one of the most notable achievements of agricultural science in 
recent years. 
Another notable achievement is the discovery that in the case of most of the 
large-cropping varieties of potatoes the use of seed from certain districts in 
Scotland or the northern counties of Ireland is profitable. This is another 
instance of an increase large enough to be measured accurately by the single-plot 
method. Reports on the subject show that seed brought recently from Scotland 
or Ireland gives increased yields of from thirty to fifty per cent. over the yields 
produced by seed grown locaily for three or more years. 
That the single-plot method fails to give definite results in many cases where 
it has been used for manurial trials is a matter of common knowledge. Half the 
reports of such trials consist of explanations of the discrepancies between the 
results obtained and the resnlts which ought to have been obtained. The moral 
is obvious. The single-plot method, which suffices to demonstrate results as 
striking as those given by phosphates on some kinds of pasture land, signally 
fails when the subject of investigation is concerned with differences of ten per 
cent. or thereabouts. 
Before suggesting a remedy for this state of things it will be well to consider 
