SECTION M.—AGRICULTURE. 
CHEMISTRY AND AGRICULTURE 
ADDRESS BY 
DR. ALEXANDER LAUDER, 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
A RECENT President of this Section referred in his presidential address 
to the fact that while many of his predecessors in this chair had been 
chemists, none of them in recent years had taken the relation of chemistry 
to agriculture as the subject of his address. A glance at the subjects of 
the addresses for the past twenty years shows that the presidents who 
have been chemists have confined themselves to general agricultural 
questions or to problems of agricultural education or research. It is 
true that in his address at Toronto in 1924 Sir John Russell dealt with 
“Present Day Problems in Crop Production,’ and in his masterly survey 
of the progress of agriculture during the past century, delivered at the 
Centenary Meeting of the Association in 1931, he surveyed the develop- 
ment of agricultural chemistry during the century, the treatment in both 
cases being necessarily general. 
The importance of the application of science, particularly of chemistry, 
to agricultural practice has been realised for a very long time. In his 
address to the first meeting of this Section at Dundee in 1912, Sir Thomas 
Middleton dealt with this aspect of the subject (‘ Early Associations for 
Promoting Agriculture and for Improving the Improver’). So far as the 
British Association is concerned, this importance, as we shall see later, 
was early realised. As far back as 1839, a petition to which many 
influential names were attached was presented to the General Committee 
asking for the formation of a separate Section for Agriculture. The 
proposal was rejected however, and for many years there was no direct 
representation of agriculture ; more recently, a Subsection for Agricul- 
ture was formed which was attached either to Chemistry or Botany, and 
the present Section was definitely established in 1912. 
When the Association last met in Leicester in 1907, agriculture was 
represented by two papers presented to the Chemical Section. One was 
a discussion on the qualities of wheat and flour, dealing particularly with 
the strength of flour, and the second on the ‘ Production of Acid or 
Alkaline Reactions in the Soil by Manures,’ by Mr. A. D. Hall. A glance 
at the recent programmes of this Section will give some idea of the 
developments which have taken place since we last visited Leicester. 
At the meeting of the Association in Swansea in 1880 Sir J. H. Gilbert was 
President of the Chemical Section, and devoted his address to the appli- 
cation of chemistry to agriculture. He pointed out that not only was the 
