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NOTE.-Unless otherwise stated, all wave-lengths are upon Rowland's scale in air at about 20° C. and 760 mm. pressure. All oscillation frequencies are in vacuo.

The Production of Haloids from Pure Materials.-Report of a Committee, consisting of Professor H. E. ARMSTRONG, F.R.S., Professor WYNDHAM R. DUNSTAN, F.R.S., Mr. C. H. BOTHAMLEY, and Mr. W. A. SHENSTONE (Secretary).

THE work of the Committee has been actively continued during a considerable part of the past year.

The various preliminary difficulties involved in the preparation of pure materials, and especially of chlorine, have now been largely overcome, and it is anticipated that considerable progress will be made during the coming year in investigating the behaviour of highly purified chlorine, and the Committee ask to be reappointed for this purpose.

A considerable part of the grant made to meet expenses already incurred in 1894 remains in hand, and therefore it is not necessary to ask for a further grant this year.

How shall Agriculture best obtain the Help of Science? By R. WARINGTON, M.A., F.R.S., Professor of Rural Economy, Oxford.

[Ordered by the General Committee to be printed in extenso.]

OUR discussion to-day will, I trust, have practical results. The time is certainly ripe for decided steps being taken. No doubt exists in the mind of any one that British agriculture is in great need of some powerful helping hand, which, in popular phraseology, shall put it on its legs again. There is probably also no doubt in the mind of any person in this room that, if the farmer is to be enabled to do his best, agriculture must be advanced from its original condition as an art, and that in future its operations must be conducted with the full assistance of natural science. The so-called 'practical man' may indeed believe that the question we have met to discuss will be at once set aside as profitless if we raise the preliminary question, Do you believe that the assistance of natural science will remove agricultural depression? I answer at once that I do not know that it will, but that this is no reason for declining the aid which science offers. When a sick man calls in a physician he does not ask the preliminary question, Do you promise to restore me to full health? If the question were asked, the physician would positively decline to make any such promise; and yet the sick man would place himself unreservedly in the physician's hands, feeling that he could not do better than make use of the best knowledge of the day on the subject of his complaint. Now agricultural science should mean the best knowledge of the day on the subject of agriculture, and a farmer will surely do wisely to obtain the aid of this knowledge in all his operations.

We have now to consider in what manner, by what methods, agriculture may best obtain the aid of science. We might divide our answer to this question into two parts. We might say, in the first place, that the science of agriculture is still only in its infancy, and that if agriculture is

to be effectively aided by science it is necessary that there should be a great increase in the number of practical investigations of agricultural questions. In the second place, we should add, that all the investigations already made, or to be carried out, will fail of practical utility if the farmer remains uninformed of the knowledge thus acquired. Our answer would thus be, that we require, firstly, an extended system of practical investigations; and, secondly, an effective scheme of agricultural education. All that will be said to-day could probably be classed under one or other of these two heads. I propose, however, in these opening remarks to adopt a less logical division of the subject. In order that our discussion may not assume an academic character, but may, if possible, lead to some practical result, I will at once descend into the region of practical politics, and endeavour to answer the question by pointing out what can most usefully be done by (1) a Board of Agriculture, and (2) by County Councils, to accomplish the objects of agricultural investigation and agricultural education, which we believe to be so important.

There are certain kinds of work which can be accomplished best by a central organisation; work which is of general, national importance; work which is necessary to form the basis of future developments. Such work should be at once undertaken by the Government, through a Department of Agriculture.

We need a really complete agricultural and horticultural library, freely open to the public. The literature of the subject is extremely large and rapidly increasing; much of it is quite beyond the reach of a private individual, while it is of too special a character to be found in our ordinary public libraries. To give one illustration. There are at the present time about 300 fully equipped experiment stations in Europe and America, besides many smaller institutions. The results of their investigations are published in numerous reports and journals in many languages. No person is able at present to refer to more than a small part of this literature. Instead of consulting the original papers, one is generally obliged to be content with the meagre abstracts furnished by a German Jahresbericht or Centralblatt, and whatever does not find entrance into these periodicals is lost to the general public. As an illustration of what may be done in this direction by an energetic Board of Agriculture, I may mention that the Department of Agriculture in the United States compiles a card catalogue of all the published work of the fifty-five American experiment stations, and supplies a copy of this catalogue to each station.

We need also an English journal published monthly, in which the results of the most important agricultural investigations should be made accessible to the general scientific public. The advantage of this to teachers and investigators would be very great. As such a journal could not be expected to pay its expenses, it should be published for the benefit of the country by the Government. The American Experiment Station Record' is an example of work done in this direction: it is chiefly, but not exclusively, concerned with the investigations made at the American stations.

Another piece of work which belongs peculiarly to a central department is the collection and preparation of national statistics. Statistics of acreage under different crops, with the annual and average produce per acre, and the number of live stock in the United Kingdom, are collected and published by the present Board. The Board that we desire would go much further

in this direction. We have at the present time no accurate idea of what is the average composition of any portion of our agricultural produce, for the simple reason that the collection of the scattered analyses, the rejection of imperfect work, and the averaging of the remainder is so large an undertaking that no private individual has had the courage to attempt the task. The results of this present lack of national information are not unimportant. We are obliged at the present time to employ German averages for all purposes of teaching or calculation. These averages are in the main prepared from German analyses, and relate to crops and foods grown in a different climate, and under different conditions, to our own. In the United States, the want of national statistics respecting the composition of foods and crops has been supplied by their Department of Agriculture, which has published in one volume more than 3,000 analyses of Americangrown foods, all properly classified and averaged. In the same way the results of American digestion experiments, made exclusively with American foods and American animals, have been collected and published, thus again obviating the necessity for relying solely on German figures.

Thus

An efficient Department of Agriculture should be provided with a staff of officers representing all the sciences connected with agriculture; these officers should be furnished with suitable laboratories, and all the machinery required for carrying out investigations and making reports. equipped the department would be able to attempt the solution of agricultural problems of pressing importance. The work done at this Government institution would also serve as a model for the investigations carried on at the smaller experiment stations. The investigations thus conducted with public money should be of a thoroughly practical character, the results of which would have a direct bearing on the farmer's work. Let me venture on a single illustration. Persian barley has lately been imported into England in considerable quantity; its price has been lower than that of any other kind of barley in the market. A question at once arises in the mind of the cattle-feeder, Is it really cheap? Will a sovereign expended on these thin, shrivelled grains purchase a greater weight of food substance, and fatten an animal better, than the same money spent on English barley? The farmer can neither make a chemical analysis nor carry out an accurate feeding experiment, but a properly equipped Department of Agriculture could do both, and in a few weeks issue a report which would be of substantial benefit to the farmers of this country.

Before leaving this part of the subject let us note what our brethren across the water are doing in this matter. Canada, though a poor country, and with a population of only five millions, has its central agricultural laboratories, and its chemists and botanists employed under its Department of Agriculture, and spends 15,000l. a year on the agricultural investigations conducted at the central station at Ottawa and at the four provincial stations. In the United States the annual cost of the investigations carried out by the Central Department of Agriculture at Washington cannot be less than 60,000l., and this is exclusive of the cost of the work done at the fifty-five experiment stations in the various States, towards which 150,000l. is annually contributed by the National Government.1

The figures quoted, both for Canada and the United States, do not include the very considerable sums spent for the same objects by the local governments in these countries.

We may certainly congratulate ourselves that we have at last a Board of Agriculture, presided over by a Minister having a seat in the Cabinet. The work done by the Board has already been of considerable benefit to the country. What we desire is that far larger means should be placed at its disposal; that the scope of its work should be enlarged; and that, especially, it should acquire a distinctly scientific character, which, as we have already remarked, simply means that the best knowledge of the day should be enlisted in the service of agriculture. We shall feel ashamed, I think, when I mention the sum at present devoted by the Board to the purpose of investigation. The grants made for education and investigation in the year 1894-95 may be summarised as follows :

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Thus 6507. is the whole sum directly devoted by the Board to the purpose of investigation: some portion of the sums contributed to collegiate centres may, however, be employed for this purpose, as experiments are conducted by some of the colleges thus assisted.

The 6,750. distributed by the Board to educational institutions is very wisely allotted to those giving a complete course of instruction. The provision of a full course of training for teachers should always have the first consideration in any educational movement.

In referring to the present national expenditure on agricultural education we must not omit the grants made by the Department of Science and Art to science schools and classes teaching the principles of agriculture. The total grant amounted in 1893-94 to the sum of 2,9371. The Department has recently attempted to improve the instruction given in these classes. A new syllabus of the subject has been prepared for the use of the teachers, with suggested experiments, and a few necessary diagrams. The Honours examination has also been made much more thorough.

We next turn to the work done in this country by local authorities. This is a very wide subject, and I can only glance at a few points. We all know that a really large sum of national money has been placed in the hands of the local authorities during the last few years, which they can use at their discretion for the purposes of technical and secondary education. The sum thus placed at the disposal of the local authorities in England for the year 1894-95 amounted to about 744,000l., of which about 600,000l. was actually spent on education. The particular educational objects aided vary, of course, very much in different localities, and it is only in the counties that we can expect to find the teaching of agriculture occupying an important place. The annual grant at the disposal of the English counties somewhat exceeds 400,000l. It is very difficult to tell how much of this is devoted to agricultural purposes. In the case of a few counties, as Kent, Bedfordshire, and Berkshire, it would appear from the figures published in the Record of Technical and Secondary Education that about one-third of the total grant is

1 I am indebted to the reports in this valuable periodical for much of the information here given respecting the agricultural work of County Councils.

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