MICHIGAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
67 
SOME NOTES ON NODULES. 
C. B. SMITH. 
Not infrequently contributors to our magazines and metropolitan 
journals undertake to frighten humanity with the ghost of old Malthus. 
They hold up to public view the proposition that humanity is likely to 
starve to death in the not remote future because of a growing scarcity 
of fixed nitrogen in the soil. We hear of waterfalls being devoted to 
the manufacture of electricity to be used in the conversion of the free 
Ogemaw Soy Beans After Cow .Peas. 
nitrogen of the air into nitrate. How many such factories it would 
take to supply the nitrates utilized by a crop of an acre and necessarily 
lost through various channels in the growing of the crop, newspaper 
writers have not yet told us. It might not be out of place to refer them 
to Mrs. Partington and her mop and her vain attempts to keep back 
the Atlantic Ocean, as a fair prototype. 
