A SUGAR-BEET DISCOVERY.
It is a cheering sight in East Anglia on any one of these winter days to watch the last and latest of our harvests. For though too many districts in rural England are losing men and women, several are gaining prosperitY where sugar-beet is being grown ; and happily the plant is found to flourish in land that few suspected of sufficient quality. The r. is a land-owner in Essex who has now proved, against most of the critics, that the heavy soil in his neighbourhood grows excellent beet. More than this, his demonstration has con- vinced a number of his neighbours that there is money in the crop and that rural revival follows the more intensive methods that it entails. The wide and deep prejudice against the new root is indeed wholly disappearing, largely owing to such individual experiments and ocular demonstration that the crop does more than give a good return : it per- manently enriches the soil by making a new strata available; and by supplying, in some degree, its own manure. In the old phrase, it " bottles sunlight " at a greater speed than any other cultivated plant on the English farm. A large farmer in South /..incolnshire has been quite converted to the crop against his early prejudices by proof of the value of the green leaves both as fodder and as manure. There will soon be fifteen factories in Britain. No man in our time has had so many temples raised in his honour as Lord Denbigh, the supreme pioneer of the new industry, and a word should be said for Mr. Alfred Wood, who has guided the propaganda with altogether exceptional skill and persistence.
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