The Clover Mystery. 243 



course no more maintain the necessary amount of humus then than 

 it can now. So far as I can judge from the leases of my property 

 of 1782, the outfield was only to be ploughed once at the beginning 

 of a lease, after which it was to lie three years in grass (or four years 

 from sowing the seed, as in Scotland they do not count the first 

 year). If ploughed again a certain course of cropping was prescribed, 

 after which the land was to lie in grass till the end of the lease. 

 When, however, artificial manures came in, such restrictions were 

 abandoned, and field after field of the outfield was added to the 

 infield till all was absorbed, and kept on a system which steadily^ 

 exhausted the humus of the land. And this circumstance has of 

 course been largely aggravated by the failure of the Clover crop — 

 sometimes entire and sometimes partial, as we have seen — for is 

 it not obvious, from what I have previously said, that the failure 

 of the humus limits the Clover crop, and that, in. turn, the failure 

 of the latter limits the supply of the former ? In this connection 

 I may call attention to a letter over the signature of " Blue Book," 

 which appeared in The Times of August loth, which shows, by a 

 reference to agricultural conditions and prices in France, that to 

 provide cheap food you must have soil fertilieed with hufnus the 

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

 by the high wheat tariff of 1892. 



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

 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 6 drills of a 

 cereal crop to i drill of a 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 i^nglish 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 laud. 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." 



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