number of fertilizers, which is assumed to be ten, be multiplied by three, and that product by three again, it will show how many points of information would arise from such a combination of experiments.

To make this clearer, we will suppose that he appropriates to each fertilizer several rows through the field, amounting to two square rods of ground; making, when the fertilizers are all applied, twenty square rods. He next applies, on the adjoining twenty rods, the same fertilizers in larger proportions; and again, on a similar section, the same fertilizers once more in still larger quantities. He now has sixty rods planted, and thirty different conditions of manure. Thus far, however, the applications have all been made in one way only. The manures have been ploughed into the soil before planting. On the next sixty rods, therefore, he duplicates the amount already planted, making no change, except that the manures are now applied in the drill. Finally, he plants a third section of sixty rods, in the same manner as before, with the exception that the fertilizers are applied differently, by combining the two previous methods into one. He now has his corn growing under ninety different conditions of fertilization, on one hundred and eighty rods, or a fraction over one acre.

In whatever way these experiments may each one terminate, if they have been rightly performed, his object is gained. The results, it is true, may not all be equally definite and certain; this is not to be expected. Yet he derives some hint, or information, more or less plain and positive, from each separate

application, while in many instances the instruction is clear and unmistakable as language can make it.

Some of the fertilizers employed will perhaps add nothing to the yield; showing that the constituents of corn contained in them were already present in the soil in suitable amount and condition. Others will add to the product in various proportions; some of them increasing the yield probably fifty per cent. or more as compared with the product on the unmanured ground.

A careful comparison of all the results, and of the ratio they bear to that of the unfertilized section of his field, will teach him which of all the fertilizers employed contain those precise elements of corn that were either absent from the soil, or, if present, were deficient in quantity or availability.

Before this trial was made, he did not know, and could not have predicted, the precise effect in any one instance out of ninety. He now has, if the experiments have been carefully and accurately executed, an intelligible result for each condition. With proper caution in making his deductions, he may derive from this experimental crop an amount of instruction and practical knowledge that could not have been obtained from any other source.

Even though some of the results should appear doubtful, and some of his deductions prove erroneous, there would still be a clear and decided preponderance of positive and reliable information that would pay him many times over for the extra time and labor it has cost him.

He may not have achieved a very remarkable crop, as to the aggregate number of bushels, but he has accomplished a more important object. He has not been aiming at a large present yield. He has merely been laying the foundation for many bountiful and remunerating crops during many years to come. Still the chances of a large product are all in his favor, even for the current year.

It is not only probable, but nearly certain, that, while he has been solving questions of permanent importance to his farm and to his future crops, he has at the same time obtained more than an average yield. While gathering an ample harvest of corn, he has gathered along with it a still more ample harvest of valuable information.

The trial crop here described, and the experiments embraced in it, are suggested, as one out of many plans, that will doubtless occur to the mind of the practical farmer. Those who find the subject of sufficient interest, will very likely be able to improve upon these hints. But the one essential idea that the author desires to impress upon the mind of the farming reader is, that the system here illustrated is capable of great expansion, and of an infinite variety in its application.

Single and isolated experiments, however useful in themselves, give no adequate idea of the increased effect that may be produced by a series of them, when ingeniously combined and accurately performed. In the hands of a skilful cultivator, a true method or system of experiments may become an invaluable

instrument of knowledge and of power; for there is scarcely any kind or degree of needed information which it may not be made to develop, and few practical problems in agriculture which it will not help to solve.

LIBRA

UNIVERSITY OF

CALIFORNIA.

PREPARATION OF THE SOIL.

IN preparing the ground for corn, the subject requiring the farmer's earliest and most careful attention is disintegration. To impart to the soil, before planting, a suitable tilth and mellowness, by mechanical processes, is an indispensable preliminary. The means of doing this, and the methods practised, are various, and of different degrees of merit; but the amount of disintegration they are capable of imparting is the great and leading consideration. The instrument, or the practice that will most completely effect the pulverization of the soil, carrying the subdivision of its particles nearest to the point of ultimate possibility, is the one to be adopted by the cultivator.

In every branch of husbandry, yet in none perhaps so much as in corn culture, the thorough reduction of the earth by mechanical division and subdivision is a matter of primary and fundamental importance.

There are, it is true, exceptional cases requiring a