A YELLOW ENGLAND.
Let me quote another conversation in a very different place with another and more famous man of science and horticulturist with experience practical, adininistrative, and " academic. " Travelling through England," he said in effect, " I was grieved to see that it was rather a yellow land than the 'ffreen and Pleasant ' land which Blake meant it to be and found it to be, physically if not in metaphor. Scarcely a crop that I saw was as green as it ought to be or as our fathers' crops used to be." The reasons 'he gave were these. Years ago fanners—of a particular district knoivn to bdth of tia—used to put fifty, even, a hundred, tons of manure to the acre, and do 'this or something like it year after year. Since the dePresSion of the l'eightieS and the subsequent surrender of the .fairiiYant; the manure has been spared and the land has become poorer and poorer. The yellow crops,
more than in evidence this year, are suffering from
nitrogen starvation. It is astonishing how every agricultural
discussion of to-day comes back to nitrogen, of which almost fantastic quantities are being extracted from the air in Britain. The new system of grass culture and close feeding depends almost wholly on its scientific use ; and on nitrogen we must depend—on the material side—for rebuilding England's green and pleasant land.
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