238 The Clover Mystery. 



APPENDIX IX. 



THE CI,OVER MYSTERY : A PROBABLE SOLUTION OF IT. 



Read at the Meeting of the British Association for the 

 Advancement of Science at Cambridge, August 19th, 1904. 



Judging 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 diflBcnlty," 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 

 four 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 rye-grass) 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 

 seedsman 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 coujrse, 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 20 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 : — 



