Hie late Dr. Voelcker, 
315 
Ag^ricultural Society, at the instance, and at the cost, of His 
Grace the Duke of Bedford. These experiments were com- 
menced in 1877. In the following year the conduct of ihcm 
devolved entirely upon Dr. Voelcker himself, and to the last 
he took the deepest interest in their management, and in 
their results. The main series, those in Stackyard Field, have 
been conducted with the greatest care ; and if those in whose 
interest they were devised, and have been carried out hitherto, 
are not in too great a hurry, and kill tlie goose before the golden 
egg is laid, results of much importance will doubtless be 
attained. From the other field experiments at Woburn, arranged 
and conducted with less regard to the previous history and 
uniform character and condition of the land, less can be 
expected. Of this. Dr. Voelcker was obviously fully conscious ; 
for one of his last Reports, that in which he gives the results ol 
the experiments on Barley in Lansome Field in 1882, after 
swedes fed off with cake and corn in 1881, he concludes as 
follows : — 
" It may be laid down as a good rule, that no legitimate 
conclusion as regards the efficacy and value of manures can be 
drawn from results obtained in field trials with manures, when- 
ever the produce of two unmanured plots in a series of field 
experiments shows differences as great as the above diflerences 
between the average )ield of the variously manured and un- 
manured plots. The natural variations in the productive powers 
of the four experimental acres in Lansome Field have probably 
more to do with the variable harvest-results in 1882 than the 
manures which were applied to the swede-crop in the preceding 
year." 
Very soon after he had devoted himself to Agricultural 
Chemistry, Dr. Voelcker commenced to pay attention to the 
various aspects of the subject of the Feedivff of Animals. He 
had not the same facilities, either for conducting feeding experi- 
ments himself, or for arranging with others to conduct them, that 
he had in the case of field experiments with manures. He, how- 
ever, not only wrote and lectured on the chemistry of the feeding 
process, but he analysed a very large number of food-stuffs, both 
home-grown and imported. He determined the composition, 
in much detail, of most of the crops grown on the farm as 
food, of new plants proposed to be grown as food-crops, ot 
hay, of various descriptions of straw, of certain refuse matters, 
and so on ; discussing at length their actual and comparative 
feeding-value, as deduced from the results of his laboratory 
investigations. 
But perhaps the most essential service he rendered, not only 
to the Members of the Society, but to farmers generally, in con- 
