occasioned by the sale of meat. Conclusion: progressive fertility, profit secure, suppression of a portion of human labour, simplification of the operations; such is the purpose and such is the result.

Here, gentlemen, let us pause, and from respect for science, at the risk of repeating ourselves to some extent, let us give this result its philosophical expression.

In the meadow man works, in the pasture the animal works, or rather the sun. In fact grass is for the animal what coal is for the locomotive, the source of its activity and of its functions. To ascend Mont Blanc a man has to burn in his system 350 grammes of carbon; to graze the pasture and acquire a kilo. of living weight an ox has to burn 1 kilo. 33 grammes, which represent two horse-power days or four days' work of an ox, the mechanical work of which is the ploughing of half a hectare.

Even if the number of oxen is forty or fifty, the price of mechanical work is reduced almost to 0. For this it is sufficient to let the oxen work half a day during one week, and leave them to rest during the next week. A kilo. or two of oil cake given in addition to their food during the period of work

prevents their fattening from being impeded. And then the pasture substituted for the meadow becomes with reference to the sun the equivalent of an accumulator, in which the stored-up energy generates at once meat and mechanical work by the intervention of a second accumulator of a higher order, the ox, the substance of which becomes in turn one of the sources of human energy. The man who moves, fights, or thinks, derives the faculty and the means from the flesh of the ox, or more generally from his food.

Pasturage and its derivatives are in reality the affirmation in all degrees of the laws of life, from the depths of the starry world to the least movement of the humblest larva.

A dazzling vision, destined by its resulting applications to form the ultimate and most solid basis of agricultural progress; and hence we return to practice.

Grass-land converted into an independent cultivation, without expense, and producing meat-this is the solution of the first term of the agricultural problem. It may be summed up in one line : Manure the meadows chemically and convert them into pasture.

We pass to the second term of the agricultural

problem, the cultivation properly so called. In the three-years' system, to 200 hectares of land there are 134 hectares of no value-100 in the state of meadow, which gain nothing, and thirtyfour hectares of dead fallow, the only utility of which is the better to secure the preparation of the soil.

On this point the reform which I propose is neither less profound nor less complete than that of the meadow. In place of leaving the fallow in a dead state, we will use it to produce manure without passing through the systems of animals, which effects an economy of at least 100 francs per hectare. Thanks to an artifice which I am about to point out, we convert the fallow into a veritable manure-pit without in any way losing its utility for destroying the weeds, and for facilitating the preparation of the soil.

Let us speak of the means of obtaining this result.

You know, gentlemen, that plants are divided into two classes: those which, like the cereals, require to receive nitrogen in manure, and those, of which clover is the most perfect type, which draw by preference nitrogen from the air in the state of gas.

For ten years I have been accustomed to sow

Complete Manure

each year at the experimental field of Vincennes clover along with hemp and wheat, and each year I

find that in the plot which has received the complete manure the wheat and the hemp are very fine, and the clover only moderate. On the plot which had received mineral manure without nitrogen the clover is splendid, whilst the hemp and the wheat are poor, yellow, and ill-developed.

To diffuse in the agricultural world this two

fold affirmation I had the idea of repeating the same experiment in pots, operating with earth taken from the field at Vincennes, in plots which since their formation had received complete manure or mineral manure without nitrogen.

The same experiment was made in 1888 by M. L. Dumont, in one of the experimental fields connected with the great agricultural establishment