236 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



against which to show the state of soil science at the beginning of the 

 present century. Besides this history of agricultural education and re- 

 search in the latter years of last century and the early years of this one, was 

 the subject of the presidential address of the late Prof. T. B. Wood, 

 before this section at Birmingham in 1913. 



Soil science in this country was in a comparatively stagnant state at the 

 beginning of this century. Britain had done much in the development of 

 the fertiliser industry, though even in this, while other countries were 

 advancing rapidly, we had been falling somewhat into the background 

 during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. 



When the revival of agricultural science began after 1890 one of the 

 chief lines of investigation which was undertaken at first — perhaps because 

 it was the easiest and most obvious — consisted of field experiments on the 

 action of fertilisers on crops. 



This was natural. The classical work of Rothamsted consisted largely 

 of fertilisation experiments made upon field plots. This had done much 

 to build up the foundations of our knowledge of crop requirements and 

 soil fertility. The numerous experiments carried out with fertilisers all 

 over the country at the end of last century were partly intended as demon- 

 strations of this old knowledge and partly intended to extend it in details. 

 Besides the resources financial and otherwise of the new agricultural 

 teachers left much to be desired. As a rule they had no experimental 

 farms and they had very limited opportunities for laboratory work, but 

 it was possible with their very limited financial resources to make field 

 experiments with the help of farmers and fertiliser manufacturers. Of 

 fundamental research on the soil there was little or none, the resources in 

 time and money, and perhaps also in knowledge, of teachers rapidly 

 recruited to carry out the new agricultural teaching schemes, were not 

 such as to enable them to do much of the more difficult work which 

 requires properly equipped research laboratories and experimental fields. 



A comparison of the text-books on Agriculture and Agricultural 

 Chemistry of the beginning of the century with those of the present day 

 will illustrate the great change in our outlook on soil science. There 

 were no British text-books on soil science in 1900. Any text-books on 

 this subject in English were American. The information on the soil in 

 our text-books on Agriculture and Agricultural Chemistry was derived 

 largely from Geology and Mineralogy, or was information about soil 

 composition and analysis and the use of fertilisers, with a little soil know- 

 ledge which had filtered through from foreign sources. Our knowledge 

 of what was being done by soil investigators abroad was not extensive, of 

 what was being done in Russia we knew nothing. Even up to the out- 

 break of the great war we were still comparatively ignorant of the great 

 movements in soil science which were taking place abroad. We looked 

 upon the soil almost entirely from the point of view of its fertility and use- 

 fulness as a medium for the growth of plants, and any study of the soil 

 itself apart from its use as a medium for the production of crops, was 

 almost non-existent. 



Britain is a comparatively small country falling within ten degrees of 

 latitude, with a climate which is in all parts temperate and humid and with 



