Growth of Wheat. 
255 
I will conclude this notice by an extract from a letter addressed 
to me on this subject by Professor Wilson : — 
" It is very desirable that these principles should be properly 
tested on a sufficiently large scale, and by reliable persons who 
would themselves take care that the advice given should be 
correctly followed. A few years' experience would then enable 
us to determine whether M. Thury's deductions are valid as 
a law." 
4. — Professor Ville's Experiments on the Growth of Wheat. 
It may be well for the same Journal which records the 
important results of Mr. Lawes' continuous experiment on 
the growth of wheat, to make some mention of trials now in. 
progress in France, undertaken with a similar aim and resting 
on a somewhat similar basis. 
M. Ville has been for some time known as a man of science 
who had turned his attention to vegetable physiology in con- 
nection with chemistry, and his experiments for testing the 
conditions of the growth of plants in artificial soils and atmo- 
spheres have excited the more notice because the results he 
obtained were at variance with those of Boussingault and others. 
M. Ville affirms with increasing confidence the doctrine that 
plants can, to some extent, feed directly upon the nitrogen in 
the air ; a belief which Boussingault seems to have been con- 
strained by his own most accurate experiments to renounce, even 
in regard to that tribe of plants for which he had formed 
favourable anticipations. 
That zealous patron of Agriculture, the Emperor of the 
French, has installed M. Ville in a Professorship of Natural 
Philosophy at Paris ; has provided for him a splendid laboratory 
on a scale which rivals Rothamsted ; and, to complete the 
parallel, has put at the disposal of the Professor trial-fields at 
the Imperial Farm of Vincennes, where the doctrines of the 
class-room are set forth in field doctrines, and illustrated by 
growing practical results. The three varieties of plants have been 
selected for a continuous experiment in the same soil with the 
same chemical fertilizers : wheat, to represent the cereals ; peas, 
for the leguminosae ; and beet-root. 
These trials have already been maintained for three years ; 
and the wheat crop, now to be recorded, is the third produced in 
three successive seasons from one dressing applied in December, 
1860. 
It has been objected to Mr. Lawes, by Baron Liebig, that his 
dicta have been verified only on one class of soils ; and the 
objection, so far as it is correct, is important : it is therefore a 
happy circumstance that the land assigned to M. Ville is 
