534 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVIII. No. 981 



at Oxford by the board of agriculture and 

 the development commission. The excellent 

 example set by Hall and Russell in their 

 "Survey of the Soils and Agriculture of 

 the Southeastern Counties," an example 

 which is being followed in Cambridge and 

 elsewhere, seems likely to result in the near 

 future in a complete survey of the soils of 

 England which will make a sound scientific 

 basis for delimiting the areas over which 

 the results of manurial or variety trials are 

 applicable. 



Reviewing this branch of agricultural 

 science, the outlook is distinctly hopeful. 

 New fertilizers are coming into the market, 

 as, for instance, the various products made 

 from atmospheric nitrogen. New varieties 

 of farm crops are being produced by the 

 Plant-breeding Institute at Cambridge, and 

 elsewhere. It is to be hoped that the work 

 of the Agricultural Economics Institute at 

 Oxford will throw new light on the inter- 

 pretation of experimental results from the 

 accountancy standpoint. Finally, the soil 

 surveys on which the colleges have seriously 

 embarked wiU assist in defining the areas 

 over which such results are applicable. It 

 only remains for those of us who are respon- 

 sible for the conduct of field trials to in- 

 crease the accuracy of our results, and the 

 steady accumulation of a mass of systematic 

 and scientific knowledge is assured. It will 

 be the business of the advisory staffs with 

 which the colleges have recently been 

 equipped by the board of agriculture and 

 the development commission to disseminate 

 this knowledge in practicable form to the 

 farmers'. of this country. 



One more point, and I have finished this 

 section of my address. I have perhaps in- 

 veighed rather strongly against the publica- 

 tion of the results of single-plot trials. I 

 quite recognize that the publication of such 

 results was to a great extent forced upon 

 those experimenters who were financed by 



annually renewed grants of public money. 

 Nowadays, however, agricultural science is 

 in a stronger position, and I venture to 

 hope that most public authorities which 

 subsidize such work are sufficiently alive to 

 the evils attendant on the publication of in- 

 conclusive results to agree to continue their 

 grants for such periods as may suffice for 

 the complete working out of the problem 

 under investigation, and to allow the final 

 conclusions to be published in some prop- 

 erly accredited agricultural journal, where 

 they would be readily and permanently 

 available to all concerned. This would in 

 no wise prevent their subsequent incorpora- 

 tion in bulletins specially written for the 

 use of the practical farmer. 



So far I have confined my remarks to sub- 

 jects of which I presume that every member 

 of the section has practical experience, sub- 

 jects which depend on the measurement of 

 the yield per unit area. These subjects, 

 however, although they have received far 

 more general attention than anything else, 

 by no means comprise the whole of agricul- 

 tural science. Certain scientific workers 

 have confined their efforts to the thorough 

 solution of specific and circumscribed prob- 

 lems. I propose now to ask the section to 

 direct its attention to some typical results 

 which have been thus achieved during the 

 last twenty years. 



The first of these is the development of 

 what I may call soil science. Twenty years 

 ago the bacteriology of nitrification had 

 just been worked out by Warington and by 

 Winogradski. The phenomena of ammo- 

 niacal fermentation of organic matter in 

 the soil were also fairly well established. The 

 fixation of atmospheric nitrogen by organ- 

 isms symbiotic on the leguminosse had been 

 definitely demonstrated. Fixation of nitro- 

 gen by free-living organisms had been sug- 

 gested, but was still strenuously denied by 

 most soil investigators. No suggestion had 



