the permanent backbone of the society. This is shown by the average amount of the orders: thus at Padua it is 10l. 11s.; at Parma it is as low as 21. 8s., and tends to decline. The French Syndicates have had the same experience, and it is found that out of their 850,000 members, there are hardly 4,000 who possess 250 acres. In connection with this subject the question of branch stores is found to be important. Though the Syndicates do not cover very large areas, they find it difficult to get orders sent to the central office from the remoter villages, which are generally just the places that most need help. Hence the larger societies often establish branch offices, with or without a warehouse, or have appointed as their agents the small agricultural societies and village banks, which are numerous in parts of Italy. It has already been mentioned that the Syndicates are, as a rule, almost purely trading bodies. Propagandist worksuch as the organisation of agricultural shows, agricultural education, measures to protect crops from disease-is the work of the agricultural societies (comizi), and very excellent some of their work is, showing perhaps sometimes a greater enterprise and inventiveness than is found among corresponding societies in England. But the Syndicates have in their own trading interests been to a certain extent impelled to take up educational work. For instance, they naturally start experimental plots to show the results of their manures, diffuse information as to manurial values, and have demonstrations to show the working of machines unfamiliar to the district; and sometimes they have trenched on the ground that belongs more properly to the Agricultural Societies. The Federation does valuable work in these directions. It has nearly 200 experimental plots, it distributes annually nearly 20,000 sheets and leaflets on various kinds of manures, and sends out 3,000 samples of nitrates with instructions as to their use, the latter largely to elementary schools. It sends tables of manurial values to, among others, every parish priest, and has them put up at the railway stations. It has founded two scholarships for the training of young men to be managers of Syndicates. The local Syndicates often do the same kind of work, organising small exhibitions of implements and seeds, in one case a large cheese show, giving prizes at agricultural shows, supplying materials and diagrams for agricultural teaching at elementary schools, starting local agricultural papers, and organising experimental plots. The Padua Syndicate has had a successful Educational Work of the Syndicates. 75 competition for the best school plot in the district. The most far-reaching side of this kind of work is that which touches co-operative production-a field in which a good deal has been done outside the Syndicates. The Mantua Syndicate has established a co-operative drying-shed for silk cocoons, the process being a very important one to raisers of silk-worms. The Parma Syndicate has recently founded a wine factory, where wine made by its members can be refined and reduced to a common type-a necessary process before the pure and excellent Italian wine can get the footing it deserves in the foreign market. In summing up the work of the Italian Syndicates, it must be remembered that they have only been in operation for ten or twelve years, that some of the most important of them date. only from five or six years back. In that short time they have already done much. They have established themselves through a large part of Italy; they have benefited not only their own members, but the whole agricultural community by reducing materially the price of manures and implements; for their own members they supply goods of a much higher quality than any that it was possible to obtain before. Thus they have been giving, and are still giving, a great stimulus to improved agriculture; and they promise to carry their work into fields as yet hardly attempted, or, as the French Syndicates are doing, to organise the sale of agricultural produce direct to the consumer, and extend co-operative principles to its preparation. They have a great future before them. Together with the other agencies that the Italian farmers have started-the cooperative dairies, already numerous, the co-operative wine factories, which are beginning to show themselves, the cooperative banks to supply the farmer with capital, the excellent system of agricultural education-they show that Italian agriculture is determined to face and conquer its difficulties. And if we may judge from the rapid strides that are being made, by the steady advance in their prosperity, the Italian farmers will succeed and come out of the agricultural crisis stronger than they were before. Gaydon, Warwick. BOLTON KING. LAWES AND GILBERT'S TABLES. 1. THE PRINCIPLES ON WHICH THE TABLES ARE BASED 2. DISCUSSION OF LAWES AND GILBERT'S TABLES. (a) Manurial Value v. Original Cost of Food LOSSES IN MAKING FARMYARD MANURE (a) The Woburn Experiments . (b) Continental Experiments THE DURATION OF MANURIAL RESIDUES (a) The Rothamsted Experiments (b) The Woburn Experiments. PAGE 76 79 80 82 82 83 84 84 85 85 87 94 95 101 106 107 108 108 109 109 112 113 113 113 114 110, 111 TABLE OF COMPENSATION VALUES HISTORICAL. WITH the introduction of concentrated feeding stuffs and artificial manures the question immediately arose as to what compensation, if any, should be given to an outgoing tenant who, having purchased largely of these substances in the latter years of his tenancy, could not be supposed to have yet reaped the full benefit of the fertilising material he had added to the soil of his farm. Where a tenant has, for instance, consumed on his holding linseed cake during the last year of his tenancy, the resulting dung will, it is recognised, be richer than if he had fed no cake to his stock, inasmuch as a considerable part of the nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash of the cake will be found in the dung. Further, even if the cake has been consumed a year earlier, and one crop has been grown with the dung, it will not be supposed that in this crop the tenant has recovered the whole of the valuable constituents he supplied to the land, but that a certain amount will be left over for succeeding crops. It became very desirable, therefore, to endeavour to ascertain, as nearly as possible, what proportion of the manure added to the land in the shape of dung produced by the consumption of different foods was removed in successive crops, and what proportion might be expected to remain in the land after one, two, or more crops had been taken off. Further questions of importance were :-How the value of the manure depended upon the materials from which it was made; how it was further affected by the conditions of preparation and storage; how a difference of cropping would affect the residual value; and what difference of results might be expected according to the varying nature of the soil. There soon grew up, in different districts, certain methods of valuation which sought to regulate the allowance that might fairly be given to an outgoing tenant for improvement which he had effected in this way, but the full benefit of which he had not yet reaped. These methods were very variable in nature, and, generally speaking, very arbitrary in character; but, in default of a better, they became, each in its district, the "custom of the country." In 1875 a Committee of the Central Chamber of Agriculture tabulated these different "local customs," and it will be found that, amid great diversities, they all agree on one main principle, that of fixing the allowance which the outgoing tenant shall receive and the landlord or incoming tenant pay, on the basis of the original money cost of the food purchased for the holding. As far back as 1861 Mr. J. B. (afterward Sir John) Lawes pointed out that the cost of a feeding stuff bore no direct relation to its value as a manure; later, in a paper read before the Farmers' Club in 1870, he drew up a Table in which he gave the manurial values of various purchased foods. This Table was somewhat further elaborated in a paper published in 1875 in anticipation of the Agricultural Holdings Act of that year.1 The issue of this Table by Mr. Lawes gave rise to a great deal of discussion, and the desire was expressed strongly by practical men to test by actual experiment, whether the great differences in the value of various foods, as set out by Mr. 1 Journal R.A.S.E., Vol. 36, 1875, pp. 1-38. Lawes on theoretical grounds, were borne out in practice, i.e., in the relative increase in crop which they produced. The Royal Agricultural Society of England took up the matter warmly, and, at the instigation of a well-known member of its Council, the late Mr. Charles Randell, of Chadbury, Evesham, an inquiry was undertaken by the Chemical Committee of the Society towards the close of 1875. This Committee held sittings in February, 1876, at which the evidence of Mr. Lawes, Mr. Squarey, Mr. Huskinson, Mr. Jacob Wilson, Mr. James Martin, Dr. Voelcker and other witnesses, both on the practical and the scientific side, was taken. The Committee finally expressed the opinion that it was very desirable that experiments, under careful scientific guidance, should be carried out in order to determine the "manurial and feeding-value of cakes and other feeding-stuffs." Meanwhile, the then Duke of Bedford had very liberally offered to place at the Society's disposal a farm on his estate at Woburn, at which such experiments might be carried out. He further undertook to defray all the expenses involved in such a trial. This generous offer was readily accepted by the Society, and Mr. Lawes and Dr. Voelcker were asked to prepare the scheme of experiment. This was the origin of the Woburn Experimental Station. The primary purpose for which it was established was to test the accuracy of the estimated values which Mr. Lawes had put on the manure made from purchased foods. In the course of the present paper it will be seen how largely the experiments conducted at the Woburn Farm have been drawn upon to supply data for the revision we have attempted of Mr. Lawes' original Tables. In 1883 a new Agricultural Holdings Act was passed, and, as a consequence of this, the whole subject of unexhausted manure values was re-discussed in 1885 in a paper contributed to the Royal Agricultural Society's Journal by Sir John Lawes in conjunction with the late Sir Henry Gilbert.' In this paper a Table is set out giving the value, from year to year, of the residue left in the land after the consumption of certain foods on the holding. This Table was further revised and the values brought up to date in papers contributed to the same Journal in 1897 and 1898.2 The error involved in taking the cost price of feeding stuffs as a basis for the valuation of the manure produced by their consumption has been acknowledged for a long time, and many alternative suggestions have been put forward. Among these have been attempts to apply Lawes and Gilbert's Tables to the practical business of valuing. It must be 1 Journal R.A.S.E., Vol. 46, 1885, pp. 590-611. 2 Ibid., Vol. 58, 1897, pp. 674-711, and Vol. 59, 1898, pp. 103-117. |