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Science and. the Farmer. 



[June,. 



passing through hard times, and therefore Science steps in with 

 suggestions which will enable the farmer to get better results 

 with less expenditure of time and energy. We grant at once 

 that other remediary measures are necessary, but here is an 

 obvious one — how to be wealthy by being wise ! Everyone wishes 

 to succeed, to get some way on, to have production speeded 

 up : and the Ministry of Agriculture meets this desire with the 

 suggestion — " Try some of our patent scientific levers." It is 

 a fair offer and one that may be trusted. Even if there be a 

 difference between what can be done in the station at Rothamsted 

 and what can be done on a farm at Eothiemurchus. it is for the 

 farmer to meet the scientist frankly and show where the hitch is. 

 Empirical lore, is often marvellous, but it will lose nothing by 

 joining hands with scientific research. Indeed, it is sure to gain. 



Let us take a few instances of the new knowledge which 

 promises new power. The soil is fundamental, of course, but the 

 days of soil fatalism are long since past. To Dr. Russell and his 

 school we owe a knowledge of the woys of making the soil 

 young again when it grows exhausted, and of making it whole 

 when it turns sick. For the soil is living to a degree that Liebig 

 never suspected. Farmyard manure is becoming scarcer — 

 thanks to motor transport — but there is plenty of straw. So the 

 bacteriologist steps in and harnesses two kinds of bacteria to the 

 task of rotting the straw. .How well they do it may be inferred 

 from the fact that an experimental plant has been devised 

 capable, it is believed, of turning out 2,000 tons of straw manure 

 per annum, at a cost probably under £500. This is just one 

 example out of many; we might refer to experiments on green 

 manure, on making crumbly soil, and on curing acidity. We 

 would rather emphasise the stimulating idea of scientific control. 

 Tilth is something of a mystery; analyse it — discover what it 

 actually means, physically and chemically — and a new day 

 dawns : it can be controlled. The new work has also brought 

 into prominence, as we said, a new idea: — " The soil is no 

 longer looked upon as an inert mass of mineral particles ; it is a 

 great living complex, teeming with countless millions of living 

 things each straggling for existence, and each having some 

 influence on those complicated chemical changes on which the 

 growth of all plants depends, and which in the course of ages 

 have turned a stratum of bare rock into something approaching 

 a vast chemical laboratory." 



Just as the synthetic chemist has been like a conjuror shuffling 

 the cards of Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen and so forth, 



