An Important Discovery.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 17 July 1914, Page 7

An Important Discovery.

During the last twenty years or so our ideas about manuring land have become revolutionised, and we seem to be on the edge of discoveries which may be of vast importance and may very much influence our treatment of the land for growing crops. More than thirty years ago it was found out that certain organisms in the soil produced nitric acid from decaying matter ; less than thirty years ago the bacteroids which live in the nodulss on the roots of beans and clover and serve these plants with nitrogenoui compounds were discovered ; later on the existence of countless millions of all sort* of microbes in th« soil whose function it was to decompose mineral and vegetable material for the use of the crops was found out, and now the latest discovery comes from Rothamsted, where all our knowledge of manures originated, that there are certain other organisms in the soil of the nature of algae which live on these useful microbes and so check their work ; indeed, may check them so badly as to make the land practically sterile and prevent manure from doing any good to a crop. Experimental trials by boiling or heating the soil, or using disinfectants to kill them, have resulted in a great improvement of fertility. This treatment cannot be carried out on a field scale, but ii is now remembered that when the Continental vine growers injected carbon disulphide into the soil to kill the phylloxera pest there was a great and unlooked-for increase in the fertility of the soil, and it is suggested that these microbe-con-suming algae were killed as well as the phylloxera disease, allowing the fertilising microbes to develop. One feels like wishing he had lived for another hundred years till these discoveries had been brought into practical use, for apparently the waste places will yet be made glad by scientific treatment.—" The

Dairy."