SKETCH OF SAMUEL WILLIAM JOHNSON. 119 



for the next book, its complement, How Plants Feed, published 

 in 1870. It was exclusively occupied with the subject of vege- 

 table nutrition. The writer, the author said, did not natter him- 

 self that he had produced a popular book. " He has not sought 

 to excite the imagination with high-wrought pictures of over- 

 flowing fertility as the immediate result of scientific discussion 

 or experiment ; nor has he attempted to make a show of revolu- 

 tionizing his subject by bold or striking speculations. His office 

 has been to digest the cumbrous mass of evidence in which the 

 truths of vegetable nutrition lie buried out of the reach of the 

 ordinary inquirer, and to set them forth in proper order and in 

 plain dress for their legitimate and sober uses." The author's 

 method was to bring forth all accessible facts, to present their 

 evidence on the topic under discussion, and dispassionately to 

 record their verdict. The books were therefore commended to 

 students of agriculture on the farm or in the school. Besides these 

 books, Prof. Johnson edited Fresenius's Quantitative Analysis, 

 and two editions of his Qualitative Analysis. 



The American Agriculturist names Prof. Johnson as one of 

 the trio, consisting of Johnson, Gossman, and the late Dr. Cook, 

 of New Jersey, " who have done so much for agricultural science 

 and experimentation." 



The purposes and efforts of Prof. Johnson to make the Con- 

 necticut Agricultural Experiment Station of practical benefit to 

 farmers are obvious to every one who inquires into the character 

 of the work done there, or who will peruse a series of the re- 

 ports of the institution. These reports are consistently animated 

 by the single thought of those particular features of agricultural 

 science in which the farmers are most immediately interested. 

 One of the predominant crops of the State is grass ; the thing the 

 farmers most need to make their agriculture profitable is econom- 

 ical and efficient fertilizers. Accordingly, we find these among 

 the subjects most conspicuously presented. It would be impracti- 

 cable to go over all the reports seeking instances of this happy 

 adaptation of investigations to the peculiar wants of the people 

 whom it was the station-director's purpose to serve ; but two or 

 three from the later reports will illustrate this characteristic of 

 his work. Attention is directed in the report for 1886 to the 

 important relation of the mechanical constitution of soils to the 

 growth of plants. Very little practical benefit, the author ob- 

 serves, is commonly obtained from the analysis of any special 

 soil beyond the detection of some deleterious ingredient, or prov- 

 ing the relative deficiency of one or more needful elements. In 

 most of the cases where the station had undertaken to make soil 

 analyses, the results had probably disappointed those who sup- 

 plied the samples. It was pointed out as an obvious defect of the 



