. 
262 BULLETIN OF THE BUSSEY INSTITUTION. 
peas. Nevertheless, a large proportion of the powder passed 
through meshes of 4-inch. A struck bushel of it weighed 88 tbs. 
The Irishman employed for the foregoing trials was an old, 
experienced, and careful farm-laborer, accustomed to sow grain 
upon small fields.. He had often been employed by myself to 
scatter fertilizers at will upon grass-land, in previous years. In 
the present instance he carried the supply of fertilizer in a wooden 
water-pail hanging upon his arm. It is to be noted that this 
laborer worked without the least bias in favor of scattering any 
particular quantity of the fertilizers. In fact, he had not the 
slightest idea of the drift of the operations upon which he was 
engaged. He knew only that I wished to have the materials sown 
evenly and truly, and he did his best to accomplish this result. 
In order to determine how much the rates of scattering would 
differ from the foregoing results, in case the materials were sown 
by a man of different mould from the old-country man above 
described, I appealed to one of the students of the Bussey In- 
stitution, an exceptionally intelligent American of one and twenty 
years, whose height exceeded six feet by more than as many 
inches as the Irishman’s fell short of it, and he was good enough 
to carry out my wishes. He had watched the slow and careful 
operations of the laborer with no sympathy, and proceeded to do 
the work in a very different way. He carried the fertilizer in a 
seed-bag slung upon his shoulder, and marched over the field at a 
much more rapid pace than that of his predecessor. He had 
no knowledge as to the actual weights of the materials sown, 
either by himself or by the workman, yet it appeared on summing 
up his work that he had strewn nitrate of soda at the rate of 
194 tbs. to the acre, and muriate of potash at the rate of 116 Ibs. 
It should be said that this young man, though reared upon a 
farm and accustomed to labor, had had little or no experience as 
a sower. He had on one occasion strewn land-plaster upon his 
father’s farm, but had never undertaken to sow anything that 
requires care. He himself clearly recognized the fact that he 
could not throw the materials so evenly as the skilled laborer. 
In a word, the two operators employed in these trials were as 
unlike as they well could be, and I deemed it remarkable that the 
results obtained by the young man were not more different than 
they were from those of the old laborer. 
I am inclined to accept the latter’s work as normal, and to 
regard the figures given in the table as useful indicationsof what 
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