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SCIENCE AND THE AGRICULTURAL 
CRISIS. 
ADDRESS TO SECTION M (AGRICULTURE) BY 
CHARLES CROWTHER, M.A., Px.D., 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
In addressing the Section as President I would confess at the very 
outset to a pride that I should be permitted to occupy a post of such 
great honour, for which my chief qualification must be that of having 
graduated through every other office provided for in the Sectional 
organisation. 
I could only have wished that the honour had fallen to me in any 
year other than the present, in which my energies have been fully 
absorbed by the duties of a new appointment of a peculiarly difficult 
character; and it is with some misgiving that I venture to address the 
Section to-day, being conscious of haying nothing to offer but a faw 
random thoughts, incubated at odd moments, and reduced to verbal 
form under conditions which have not permitted the careful revision 
that the occasion demands. 
For the second consecutive year the Section meets in a great sea- 
port, a city whose activities are written large across the history of 
British agriculture throughout the past century, and have contributed 
in no small degree to the anxieties with which the industry is beset at 
the present day. The part played by the port of Liverpool in shaping 
the fortunes—or misfortunes—of British agriculture might well have 
formed an appropriate subject for the Presidential Address to this Sec- 
tion, had I possessed the competence and leisure to deal with it effec- 
tively, but I must confine myself to matters falling more closely 
within the range of my everyday activities. 
When the Section met last year British agriculture was reeling 
under the shock of a second disastrous year, which in large sections of 
the industry, notably those dependent primarily upon the direct sale 
of crops, seemed likely to produce a crisis of the gravest character, 
and greatly accentuated the existing anxiety even in sections of the 
industry less directly affected. This atmosphere of crisis still unfortu- 
nately persists, though permeated now perhaps by a rather more 
optimistic note, and it must necessarily receive the consideration of this 
Section of an Association which aims at intimate touch with the every- 
day life of the nation. 
It is generally recognised that the primary causes of the present 
difficulties of British agriculture are strictly economic in character, and 
not due to any gross and general failure to apply present-day scientific 
knowledge to the technique of farming, although the great disparity 
which exists between the average production of the country and that 
secured by the more competent farmers on soils of the most diverse 
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