192 The Excessive Use of Ryegrass. 



ascribe the ruinous decline of fertility in British soils. The rye- 

 grass question seems subsequently to have gone to sleep tiU 1882, 

 when my late friend, Mr. 0. Faunce de Laune, of Sharsted Court, 

 took up the subject in a valuable and widely -known paper, which • 

 was pubhshed in the Journal of the Koyal Agricultural Society of 

 England (Part I., No. 35) in 1882. This article, as is well 

 known, not only aroused attention to the subject of ryegrass, but 

 called attention to the enormous adulterations in the grass seed 

 trade, and thus paved the way for much of what has since 

 followed, and, as Mr. Hunter points out {vide p. 80), if Mr. de 

 Laune had not gone back to the teaching of Sinclair to find out the 

 truth, we should probably have been pretty much where we were 

 twenty years ago. But the evils arising from the excessive use 

 of ryegrass have since been found to be far more extensive than 

 was originally supposed, and if the reader will turn to the paper I 

 delivered at Cambridge in 1904 {vide Appendix IX.) he will see 

 that the greatest evil lies in the effect it has of diminishing the 

 clover, with which it is usually associated — effects which have 

 been fully proved, as I have shown elsewhere, and which have 

 been proved again by the experiments of the Fif eshire Agricultural 

 Association, which show that the amount of clover rises or falls 

 as ryegrass is diminished or increased. But, perhaps, one of the 

 best evidences of the smaU amount of red clover produced when it 

 is associated with ryegrass has been met with on this property, one 

 of the tenants on which makes annually large purchases of rye- 

 grass and clover hay from various farms in the neighbourhood, 

 and for many miles around. I have constantly observed and 

 inquired into these purchases, with the view of noting the propor- 

 tion of clover that appears with the ryegrass. An occasional 

 cartload may show a fair amount of clover, but if the fields in 

 Scotland generally (and I have no reason to suppose that things 

 materially differ here from the rest of the country) show as little 

 clover, then there can hardly be said to be any scientific rotation 

 crops in Scotland at aE — in other words, the alternation of crops 

 which derive nitrogen from the air with those which must derive 

 it from the soil. All the clover losses may not be attributable to 

 the ryegrass, but that a very large proportion of these are has 

 been amply proved by the experiments made on the subject. I 

 know of nothing more striking in the whole history of the neglect 



