22S 
The Present State of /hjrimlture 
able and animal physiolog:y, and various branches of plijsics, as 
well as botany, zoology, and mechanics, are all now recognised as 
important auxiliaries to the science and practice of agriculture; — 
and your ow n, as well as other journals^ show how willingly the 
cultivators of these various departments are lending you their 
assistance. 
III. It only remains now that I should briefly advert to the 
third question we proposed to consider, " W/*at should noio be 
specially done to further or make easy the progress of scientific 
agriculture This question has no relation to the diffusion, but 
simply to the means of increasing our knowledge. And upon 
this point I shall venture to offer only three leading observa- 
tions. 
The first of these has reference to the subject of field experi- 
ments, which it becomes every day more difficult to bring up to 
the exact requirements of our advancing knowledge. Few of 
those we already possess will bear that searching criticism to 
which all our sources of certain knowledge must be suljjected. 
lixperience seems now to indicate that field experiments which 
are to furnish us with useful and trustworthy results, are not to 
be looked for from the unpractised hands and occasional inspec- 
tion of the practical rent-paying farmer; and that they must 
henceforth be entrusted to the more instructed guidance and 
watchful care of the professional experimenter. 
You will not understand me as meaning by this, that the prac- 
tical man should be dissuaded, much less precluded, from the 
trial of experiments as a most important means of ascertaining 
how, on his farm, improvements may most efficiently and most 
economically be made. This interesting and useful tentative 
method will I hope come every day into more extensive use. I 
speak only of experiments considered as a source of those sure 
and indisputable data, by which science is to be carried forward — 
by which phenomena are to be explained, gaps in our knowledge 
filled up, and theoretical views tested and improved. 
Besides, experiments are eminently suggestive. The result 
of one points out others it would be desirable to make. But 
suggestions arising from experiments undertaken for practical 
purposes, the rent-paying farmer, and even the gentleman farmer, 
cannot follow up, as if scientific truth were his sole object and time 
enough were at his disposal. What limited series of results could 
be more rich in suggestions than that published four years ago by 
Mr. Pusey (see this Journal, vol. vi. p. 530), in which 13 loads of 
manure gave as large a crop of beet as 26 loads did, or as 13 loads 
aided by 7 cwt. of rape dust, or 14 bushels of bones, — while one- 
Jimus have been previously added. These two points I have discussed at 
some length in Part VIII. of the '■Proceedings of tlie A/jriculturalChcridslry 
Association of Scotland,' which has just issued Irom the press. 
