The Clover Mystery. 187 



APPENDIX VII. 



THE GLOVER MYSTERY ; A PROBABLE SOLUTION OF IT. 



Read at the Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement 

 of Science at Cambridge, August 19th, 1904- 



JuDGiNa from my own observation, and the opinions of the 

 numerous visitors to my Clifton-on-Bowmont experimental and 

 demonstration farm, this subject is of increasing importance. " No 

 one," said a visitor lately, " can be certain that if he sows clover he 

 will be sure to get a crop of it." " If you can only solve the clover 

 difficulty," said another, " you would be of the greatest service to 

 agriculture." " This crop of clover," said a third, looking at a crop 

 growing on the poorest field on the farm, and keeping 4 ewes and 

 their twins per acre, "is worth going 200 miles to see." What a 

 deplorable condition must our agriculture be in if such things can 

 be said of that nitrogen -collecting crop on which the success of the 

 subsequent crops and grazing so largely depends. The following 

 experiment and the explanation of its results throw much light on 

 the subject. One of my agricultural visitors laid down with one of 

 my mixtures (without ryegrass) two halves of a field with seed bought 

 from our respective seedsmen. In both cases the production and 

 appearance of the clover after the harvest was the same. By the 

 spring following the clover supplied by his seedsmen had vanished, 

 while that supplied by mine continued to flourish. Being anxious to 

 compare the red clover supplied to me with that supplied to my 

 agricultural visitor by his seedsman, I asked a neighbour of the 

 experimenter to take home some of my clover plants (grown from 

 seed supplied by my seedsman), but he was unable to make the 

 comparison, as not a single plant from the seed which had failed 

 could be found. Had the whole field been sown with seed supplied 

 by my agricultural visitor's seedsman, there would, of course, have 

 been no clover at all, and the farmer and his friends would have said, 

 " Oh, clover sickness again," and thought no more about the matter, 

 such disappearances being quite common, and invariably accounted 

 for by that supposed malady. On referring the experiment to my 

 seedsman, and asking him to explain why my clover (supplied to me 

 by him on a large scale for upwards of twenty years past) has always 

 succeeded, while that of my neighbours has often been a partial, and 

 not unfrequently a complete, failure, he has replied as follows : — 



" As regards the unfailing success of your clover crop, I think this 

 is, in the first place, due to your deep cultivation by deep-rooting 



