DETERIORATION IN QUALITY OF BEETS DUE TO NITRATES 
By WM. P. HEADDEN 
\\ e have, heretofore, considered only extreme instances of the 
occurrence of nitrates in some of our Colorado soils, namely, in 
Bulletins 155* 160 and 178. The statements of these Bulletins were 
scarcely believable by persons who may not themselves have seen the 
facts, and the number of persons who have seen them is, even now, 
comparatively small. The difficulty in believing the facts set forth 
in these bulletins lay partly, in the newness of the measure in which 
the nitrates occur, partly in the general doubt of the sufficiency of 
the agency to which their formation was attributed, but still more 
largely to the fixedness of conviction that these things, if they were 
possible, would certainly have been observed before, especially as 
students of soil chemistry have been diligent in their investigations 
of kindred subjects, if not of this. 
The conditions under which the investigations, pertaining to 
the pi esence and formation of nitrates in the soil, have already been 
made are openly or tacitly assumed to have been so general that the 
conclusions arrived at are accepted as of universal application and 
the occurrence of large territories to which the established conclu¬ 
sions are only partially applicable is deemed by many very improb¬ 
able. I was keenly alive to this incredulity on the part of scientific 
men who, because of their persistent efforts to find out the facts, hold 
tenaciously to such views as their observations have led them to 
accept as embracing the whole case. The views of men who have 
done the work and made their records for our benefit are most surely 
worthy of consideration and respect, which we most willingly accord 
them, but there may be other conditions and other facts than those 
on which they based their deductions, and their conclusions may not 
be of such universal application as we, for no other reason than be¬ 
cause of our confidence in the cumulative authority of the dicta of 
various investigators, believe. I have no sympathy whatever with 
Captious objections to honest results obtained by worthy men 01- 
cavil ing at established facts in order to give the caviller the air of 
an investigator by belittling and trying to make the results of others 
appear to be of no import. 
In presenting the following facts which many, perhaps, will 
consider as even more groundless and more contradictory to gen¬ 
eral experience than the statements of the bulletins referred to, T. e., 
x 55’ x 6o and 178, I accept fully all of the statements of results ob¬ 
tained by others as the result of experiment or of facts established 
by research under the conditions obtaining in those cases. 
The task which I have set myself, to study the effects of nitrates 
upon the quality of our sugar beets, is a more difficult one than anv 
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