February, 1912.] 



135 



SCIENTIFIC AGRICULTURE. 



THE HISTORY OF AN AGRICUL- 

 TURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. 



By A. D. Hall, m.a., f.r.s. 



(From Science Progress, Vol. VI., No. 

 22, October, 1911.) 



The history of an agricultural experi- 

 ment station which has been in conti- 

 nuous existence for seventy years must 

 be expected to show considerable changes 

 both in the outlook of those conducting 

 the researches and in the opinion of 

 those concerned with the results that 

 have been achieved. 



The Rothamsted Experimental Station 

 dates its formal establishment from 1843. 

 In the period that has since elapsed, the 

 whole theory of the nutrition of the 

 plant, the function of manures, and the 

 conception of the part played by the 

 soil has taken shape, so that it may not 

 be without interest to trace the succes- 

 sive stages in the development of agricul- 

 tural science to which the work done at 

 Rothamsted has so largely contributed. 



The late Sir John Bennett Lawes was 

 a small Hertfordshire landlord who came 

 into possession ot the property at Roth- 

 amsted, near Harpenden, when a boy, 

 and in 1834 at the age of twenty entered 

 upon the management of his home farm. 

 Both at Oxford — where he had attended 

 the lectures of Dr. Daubeny— and in 

 London — where he had made the acquain- 

 tance of Dr. A. T, Thomson, author of 

 the Pharmacopoeia — he became interes- 

 ted in chemistry and one of his first steps 

 was to attempt the growing of various 

 drug plants upon the farm. His interest 

 in the science cf agriculture was perhaps 

 the most excited by the study of de 

 Saussure's Recherches sur la Vegetation 

 and he began a series of pot Experiments 

 with various substances which might 



Eossibly be used as fertilisers. It should 

 e remembered that at that time nothing 

 was known of the manurial requirements 

 ot a plant ; de Saussure, Davy and others 

 had established the nature of the ele- 

 ments usually to be found within the 

 plant but despite the researches ot Priest 

 ley and lgenhousz on the assimilation of 

 carbon dioxide the opinion was still 

 general that a plant derived a large part, 

 if not the whole of the carbon it contai- 

 ned from the humus in the soil. The 

 researches of Boussingault completed the 

 demonstration on a large scale that the 

 plaut drew its carbon from the atmos- 

 phere and this point of view was driven 

 home by Liebig's brilliant report to the 

 British Association in 1840. 



What we nowadays call artificial manu- 

 res were practically unknown. From 

 ve^ry early times men had learned empiri- 

 cally the value of materials like woollen 

 rags, rape dust, soot and bones, but their 

 specific action was unknown and the 

 importations of nitrate of soda and guano 

 and mineral phosphates had not yet 

 begun. Lawes became interested in the 

 utilisation ot spent animal charcoal, then 

 a waste product on the market and he 

 discovered that the efficacy as a manure 

 of the phosphate it contained was 

 enormously increased if the material 

 were treated with sulphuric acid, this 

 being also true of other phosphates of 

 a mineral character. His experiments 

 were extended into the fields and having 

 convinced himself of the value of supher- 

 phosphate as a turnip manure, in 1842 he 

 took out a patent for its manufacture. 

 Liebig in 1840 had recommended that 

 bones should be so treated with acid to 

 increase their solubility but Lawes' ex- 

 periments had already been successful 

 and his patent, which he confined to the 

 treatment of mineral phosphates, owed 

 nothing to Liebig. With characteristic 

 energy, Lawes set about the manufac- 

 ture of superphosphate and rapidly 

 built up an industry which provided him 

 with the fortune from which he spent so 

 lavishly in the conduct of the later 

 experiments on his estate. 



Lawes' early 'experiments had thus 

 been of a somewhat unsystematic nature, 

 but they had the very practical object 

 of ascertaining how phosphates can best 

 be applied to the nutrition of the turnip 

 crop, which turned out to be parti- 

 cularly dependent upon this element of 

 plant food. Their value was immedi- 

 ately recognised by the farming com- 

 munity, which was then in a very ac- 

 tive condition and was entering upon 

 its great epoch of development, so that 

 within ten years or so the advantages 

 of using superphosphates had become 

 thoroughly accepted by agriculturists. 

 The importance of the work that Lawes 

 had done was recognised by a pub- 

 lic subscription in 1853 which was ex- 

 pended on the erection of a laboratory 

 for the use of the then young experi- 

 mental station. This latter may be 

 said to have come into existence in 

 1843, when Lawes secured the co-oper- 

 ation of Dr. J. H. Gilbert, a young 

 chemist who had worked under Liebig 

 at Giessen ; the partnership thus entered 

 into continued until Lawes' death in 

 1900. With the advent of Gilbert, the 

 experiments took definite secientific 

 form and it should be noticed that from 



