"You ought not for a moment call it the 'Washington' theory," said Percy; "and neither is it promulgated by scientists, but rather by two or three theorists who are upheld by our greatest living optimist. Science, Sir, is a word to be spoken of always with the greatest respect. Of course you know its meaning?"
"Yes, I know it comes from the Latin _scire, _to know."
"Then _science _means _knowledge; _it does not mean theory or hypothesis, but absolute and positive knowledge. Is there any uncertainty as to the instant when the next eclipse will appear? No, none whatever. Science means knowledge, and men are scientists only so far as they have absolute knowledge, and to that extent every farmer is a scientist.
"Nevertheless the erroneous teaching so widely promulgated by the federal Bureau of Soils is undoubtedly a most potent influence against the adoption of systems of positive soil improvement in the United States, because it is disseminated from the position of highest authority. Other peoples have ruined other lands, but in no other country has the powerful factor of government influence ever been used to encourage the farmers to ruin their lands."
CHAPTER XXXII
GUESSING AND GASSING
AS we were riding to Montplain yesterday," said Adelaide to Percy, soon after they started for Blue Mound, "Professor Barstow told me that in his opinion all that was needed to redeem these old lands of Virginia and the Carolinas is plenty of efficient labor, such as he thinks we had before the war. I know papa does not agree with him in that, but Professor said that soils do not wear out if well cultivated, that in New England they grow as large crops as ever, and that in Europe, on the oldest lands the crop yields are very much larger than in the United States; and in fact that the European countries are producing about twice as large crops as they did a hundred years ago. He thinks it is because they do their work more thoroughly than we do. He says that 'a little farm well tilled' is the key to the solution of our difficulties."
"That might seem to be a good guess as to the probable relation of cause and effect," replied Percy, "but we ought not to overlook some well known facts that have an important bearing. It is exactly a hundred years since DeSaussure of France, first gave to the world a clear and correct and almost complete statement concerning the requirements of plants for plant food and the natural sources of supply. Sir Humphrey Davy, Baron von Liebig, Lawes and Gilbert, and Hellriegel followed DeSaussure and completely filled the nineteenth century with accumulated scientific facts relating to soils and plant growth.
"Sir John Bennett Lawes, the founder of the Rothamsted Experiment Station, the oldest in the world, on his own private estate at Harpenden, England, began his investigations in the interest of practical agricultural science soon after coming into possession of Rothamsted in 1834. In 1843 he associated with him in the work Doctor Joseph Henry Gilbert, and for fifty-seven years those two great men labored together gathering agricultural facts. Sir John died in 1900, and Sir Henry the following year.
"That the people of Europe have made some use of the science thus evolved is evident from the simple fact that they are taking out of the United States every year about a million tons of our best phosphate rock for which they pay us at the point of shipment about five millions dollars; whereas, if this same phosphate were applied to our own soils that already suffer for want of phosphorus, it would make possible the production of nearly a billion dollars' worth of corn above what these soils can ever produce without the addition of phosphorus. And our phosphate is only a part of the phosphate imported into Europe. They also produce rock phosphate from European mines, and great quantities of slag phosphate from their phosphatic iron ores.