Untitled

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume III, Issue 278, 5 June 1875, Page 2

A Darwinian philosopher was brought before a justice on a charge of drunkenness. In defence, he said “ Your worship, I am a Darwinian, nnd I have, I think, discovered the origin of my unfortunate tendency. One of my remotest grandfathers was an anthropoid of a curious tnrh of "mind. One morning about 4,391,633, 8.C., he was looking over his store of cocoanuts, when he picked up one for his breakfast in which the milk had fermented. He drank the liquor and got gloriously drunk, and ever after he always kept his cocoanuts until fermentation took place. Judge, then, whether a tendency handed down through innumerable ancestors should not be taken in my defence.” Casting a sarcastic look at the prisoner, the justice said, “ I am sorry that the peculiar arrangement of the atoms of star dust resulted in giving me a disposition to sentence you to pay a fine of five shillings and costs.” And fined accordingly he was. Continued growth of Barley on the same Land. —As the result of experiments on the growth of barley on the same land for twenty years in succession, Messrs Lawes & Gilbert report that when the same crop is grown consecutively on the same ground for a series of years, mineral manures alone fail to enable the plant to obtain sufficient nitrogen and carbon to yield even a fair crop; that nitrogenous manures alone increase it very considerably ; but that the largest crops are obtained when nitrogenous and mineral manures are applied together. In case of barley, these combined manures gave for twenty years in succession, on the same land, rather more of both corn and straw than farmyard manure did; considerably more than the average barley crop of the country goown under a system of rotation of crops; and an average weight per bushel of between fifty-three and fifty-four pounds.