( 260 ) [April, 



CHRONICLES OF SCIENCE. 



I. AGRICULTURE. 



The events of the past few months in the agricultural world have 

 belonged rather to the business than to the science or the art in 

 which we are interested. The cultivators of light barley-growing 

 soils have been excited by the probability, or rather the possibility, 

 that the malt tax, which they believe to injure them, may, by a 

 strenuous agitation for its removal, be reduced or taken off; and 

 the cultivators of the clay-land districts of the country have been 

 roused to something like indignation by the orders of the Home 

 Secretary forbidding the travelling upon highways of the locomotive 

 engines by which steam cultivation — so beneficial to their stiff wheat- 

 growing soils — is accomplished. These have been the two chief topics 

 of the agricultural newspapers, and neither of them is quite adapted 

 for discussion here. 



Beside these, some discussion has also arisen on other matters, 

 rather, however, of social than of strictly scientific interest. 



The Society of Arts has been at work through its committee, upon 

 the Cottage-building difficulty — inquiring into the causes which 

 retard the erection of houses for labourers in rural districts. And 

 the English Agricultural Society has been engaged through a Com- 

 mittee of its Council, upon the subject of Agricultural Education. 

 The idea entertained by some of the leading members of the latter 

 committee seems to have been, that agricultural education means 

 simply the education of farmers' sons ; and that all the Society can 

 undertake is to offer prizes for boys, the sons of farmers, who shall 

 take honours at the local University examinations of middle-class 

 schools. The results of professional education they declare incapable 

 of being ascertained, or tested by examination — than which nothing 

 can be more mistaken. It is perfectly easy'to ascertain in this way 

 the extent of any one's professional knowledge ; and whatever imme- 

 diate resolution may be pronounced by the Council, it is not likely 

 that the general body of members will, in the long run, acquiesce in 

 the proposal to throw the influence of a merely professional society 

 into the great sea of general middle-class education, where it must be 

 altogether lost. They will insist on limiting the efforts of the 

 Society to the field of professional education, where the guidance and 

 incentive of its examinations and rewards would be most effective. 



There is yet another subject to be named in an agricultural 

 review of the past quarter. The agricultural utilization of town 

 sewage has been the subject of a paper from Baron Liebig, and of 

 lectures before both the Agricultural Society and the Society of Arts. 

 The conclusions to which practical agriculturists arrive on a consi- 

 deration of this subject, are so opposed to those of the distinguished 

 German chemist, that were it not for the sanction wuich they receive 



