xception. A neighboring nursery firm had a very promising
field of wheat, which was sown late. But their land is rich and
unusually well worked. It is, in fact, in the very highest condition,
and, though sown late, the young plants were enabled to make a good
strong growth in the autumn.

In such a dry season, the great point is, to get the seed to germinate,
and to furnish sufficient moisture and food to enable the young plants
to make a strong, vigorous growth of roots in the autumn. I do not say
that two hundred pounds of superphosphate per acre, drilled in with the
seed, will always accomplish this object. But it is undoubtedly a great
help. It does not furnish the nitrogen which the wheat requires, but
if it will stimulate the production of roots in the early autumn, the
plants will be much more likely to find a sufficient supply of nitrogen
in the soil than plants with fewer and smaller roots.

In a season like the past, therefore, an application of two hundred
pounds of superphosphate per acre, costing three dollars, instead of
giving an increase of five or six bushels per acre, may give us an
increase of fifteen or twenty bushels per acre. That is to say, owing
to the dry weather in the autumn, followed by severe weather in the
winter, the weak plants on the unmanured land may either be killed out
altogether, or injured to such an extent that the crop is hardly worth
harvesting, while the wheat where the phosphate was sown may give us
almost an average crop.

Sir John B. Lawes has somewhere compared the owner of land to the owner
of a coal mine. The owner of the coal digs it and gets it to market in
the best way he can. The farmer's coal mine consists of plant food, and
the object of the farmer is to get this food into such plants, or such
parts of plants, as his customers require. It is hardly worth while for
the owner of the coal mine to trouble his head about the exhaustion of
the supply of coal. His true plan is to dig it as economically as he
can, and get it into market. There is a good deal of coal in the world,
and there is a good deal of plant food in the earth. As long as the
plant food lies dormant in the soil, it is of no value to man. The
object of the farmer is to convert it into products which man and
animals require.

Mining for coal is a very simple matter, but how best to get the
greatest quantity of plant food out of the soil, with the least waste
and the greatest profit, is a much more com