506 



SCHEMES FOR MANURIAL AND OTHER 

 AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENTS. 



Experiments and demonstrations on growing crops have long 

 been practised in this country, as is evidenced by the fact that 

 even so early as 1770 Arthur Young published two large quarto 

 volumes containing the results of nearly 2,000 original experi- 

 ments which he himself had carried out, chiefly at Bradfield, 

 in Suffolk. Later, the same agency in the improvement of 

 agriculture has been largely and successfully made use of by Sir 

 John B. Lawes and Sir J. Henry Gilbert, as well as by the leading 

 agricultural societies. 



During the past ten years this class of work has undergone 

 great extension, chiefly as the result of the funds placed at the 

 disposal of County Councils, who recognised in it a means of 

 presenting information to farmers in a form that would prove 

 at once useful and interesting. To a large extent the work was 

 delegated to the agricultural colleges and agricultural de- 

 partments [of colleges, whose reports of results have come to 

 be a familiar feature of agricultural education in agriculture. 



In the earlier years of this recent development an attempt was 

 often made to distinguish between experiment and demonstration, 

 and while such a distinction may frequently be made, there are 

 many cases where the two forms of field work so completely 

 overlap that it is practically impossible to draw any line of 

 demarcation. Generally speaking, the term experiment would 

 be used where, for example, the unknown action of some new 

 substance, or [of some substance put to a new use, was under 

 trial. A demonstration, on the other hand, is generally regarded 

 as the repetition of some well-known experiment, or of some agri- 

 cultural process whose results, under normal conditions, may be 

 confidently predicted. 



Strictly speaking, most of the field-work of recent years is 

 demonstrational rather than experimental, and, in fact, from the 



