1112 The Clover Mystery. 



supply of which has been increased, through the medium of straw, by 

 the high whoab tariff of 1892. 



In conclusion I may point out that if, with the aid of a leguminous 

 base, agriculture can be carried on for thousands of years with hardly 

 any manure, our agriculture, aided as it is by the manure of animals, 

 ought certainly to be able to do so without the aid of any purchased 

 manures if the farmer can only make sure of growing large crops of 

 clover. In Mysore, the farmers sow six drills of a cereal crop to one 

 drill of bean crop, which in its early stages is suppressed by the former. 

 After harvest the space between the bean drills is cultivated, and the 

 crop — not unlike a French bean in appearance — soon spreads over the 

 ground. The straw of the crops is used to feed cattle, and their 

 manure is burnt for fuel, the ashes only being returned to the land. 

 These crops are repeated annually, thus giving a scientific rotation 

 (the alternation of crops which derive nitrogen from the atmosphere 

 with those which must derive it from the soil) each year, and, with the 

 aid of the atmospheric nitrogen, the roots of the bean and cereal crop, 

 and the ashes of the fuel, crops, more or less good according to the 

 season, have been produced for many centuries, and will continue to 

 be produced. The scientific rotation of the English farmer occurs 

 only once in four or five years with his clover crop, and if that fails he 

 has then to purchase plant food which ought to have been produced in 

 abundance on the land. On entering one of my fields of clover, which 

 was of a beautiful dark-green hue, an agricultural visitor observed to 

 me " This field has been nitred." " So it has," I replied, " but it has 

 been so from the nitrogen produced on the land with the aid of my 

 farming system.'' It may be observed that when the farmer buys 

 nitrates, he only buys a chemical agent, whereas when he grows 

 plants which yield him nitrogen he not only acquires plant food, but 

 a physical agent as well, which ploughs the land with its roots, 

 ameliorates the whole condition of the soil, and thus enables the 

 plants successfully to contend with the vicissitudes of our climate and 

 the diseases to which all plants are liable. 



From what I have previously said it might be supposed that I 

 think that the agricultural chemist is no longer needed. That is far 

 from my idea, but the chemist must become more of a farmer, and the 

 farmer more of a chemist before either can work efiisctively in 

 arresting the downward course of our British soils. For upwards of 

 twenty-five years I have now had them through my hands on a large 

 scale, from alluvial flats up to elevations of about 801) feet, and of 

 almost every kind. I have no reason to doubt that soils elsewhere are 

 in much the same condition, and if they are I am sure that, with the 

 present agricultural system, they must gradually be deteriorating 

 and that the exhaustion of the soil, so universally complained of bv 

 the farmer, must be more and more aggravated as time advances • 

 the general conditions can only' be improved by providing the means 

 for growing large and uniformly-successful crops of clover, and if 

 this can be done, as it has been by me on the stoney, steep, poor, and 

 exhausted lands on the slopes of the Cheviots it could much more 



