When soil is partially sterilised, either by heat or by volatile antiseptics like carbou disulphide, toluene, etc., it becomes more productive and capable of yielding larger crops. The effect of heat was discovered incidentally about 25 years ago by the early soil bacteriologists; the action of carbon disulphide was first noticed somewhat later by a vine grower who had used it to kill phylloxera. Both cases have since been studied by several investigators, notably Koch and Hiltner and Störiner; a paper was also recently published by one of us in which it was shown that the property is a general one, holding for all the soils and volatile antiseptics examined and for all the plants, excepting those of the leguminous order. Thus when a soil had been heated to 95° C. it produced two, three, or sometimes four times as much crop as a portion of the soil which had not been heated, whilst treatment with volatile antiseptics led to an increase in crop varying between 20 and 50 per cent.

1. As far as the characters under observation are concerned it is immaterial which way the cross is made. Reciprocally bred first crosses are identical.

2. The inheritance of horns is closely connected with sex. Large horns are dominant in the male, recessive in the female.

3. The meaning of scurs is not yet settled. Two kinds of scurs were observed, small round firmly attached knobs and thin loose scurs. The fact, which unfortunately was not observed until the later stages of the experiment, that the appearance of scurs is sometimes delayed until the animal is two years old, has given rise to an additional complication.

4. A horned ram may be either pure horned or heterozygous as regards that character. His purity can readily be tested by mating with a number of horned ewes. If all his ram lambs are horued he is presumably pure, if any of them are hornless he is heterozygous.

5. A hornless ram must be pure hornless. His purity can be tested by mating with a number of pure hornless ewes, when all the progeny are found to be hornless.

6. A horned ewe must be pure horned. Her purity can be tested by mating her with a pure horned ram. All the ram lambs produced will be horned, for horns are dominant in the male. All the ewe lambs should be horned if she is pure. It may be several years before she bears enough ewe lambs to enable the experimenter to state with anything like certainty that she breeds true to horns. It is here that the chief difficulty of working with large animals on Mendelian lines is found. The females produce only one or two young in the year, so that several years must elapse before a female can be thoroughly tested.

7. A hornless ewe may be either pure hornless or heterozygous. She can be tested by mating with a hornless ram. The same difficulty again arises, in fact it must always arise in the case of testing slow breeding animals. The males are readily tested, but the testing of the females is so slow that it must often be uncertain. This is the explanation of the common and very true statement that the way to improve a flock is to use good males. Males are readily tested and their purity as regards desirable characters is therefore very soon assured. Several generations may have been bred from a female, and her blood diffused through the flock, before the breeder can be sure that she breeds true to the type he wants.

8. The occasional occurrence of scurs in Suffolks already referred to is probably explained by the dominance of the hornless condition in the female. A hornless ewe may be heterozygous. This can only be found out by a breeding test, and may easily be overlooked in practice. Her progeny would then mix with the flock, and a small proportion of their ram lambs would produce scurs.

9. There is no dominance of white face over black or vice versd. The first cross as regards face colour is intermediate between the two parental types. Pure white and black faces segregate in the second generation. The black face is not a simple character, since the number of speckled faces in Fa is far too large, and the speckled faces include several distinct types of pattern.

10. Woolly and bare heads appear to be a pair of characters which blend in the first cross but segregate again in later generations.

11. A number of striking instances of recombination have beenobserved. For instance, horns, woolly poll and face, and black face are combined in the ewe, Plate XII, Fig. 15. She has been shown to breed true to horns, but her purity as regards woolliness and blackness of face has not as yet been tested. Another example is the ram shown in Plate XII, Fig. 18, which combines the bare head and hornless character of the Suffolks with the white face of the Dorsets.

12. Finally attention should once more be drawn to the difficulties of experimental breeding with large animals. The slowness and lack of certainty in testing the females, and the troubles arising therefrom, have already been dilated upon. Another difficulty is the complicated nature of what might have been hoped to be simple characters. Points of economic importance such as would be likely to appeal to the butcher, the dealer or the wool merchant, are hardly likely to turn out less complicated than horns or face colour. The experiments described above have suffered greatly from the fact that it was impossible with the comparatively small area available to keep more than a very small proportion of the rams until they were old enough to show all their characters. The unsatisfactory state of the evidence given above as to the question of scurs is in part due to this. It is however a difficulty which would disappear with increased resources.

Boiling acid at atmospheric pressure decomposes organic matter in soil with evolution of carbon dioxide, and thus renders the results obtained for carbonate too high. Where there is a fairly large percentage of carbonate, the error introduced in this way is of no great importance, but in soils containing less than 1% of calcium carbonate and especially in acid soils, the error introduced by thus boiling with acid may be very considerable.

The weaker the acid used the better so long as there is fair excess. The writer recommends for acid soils and those containing low percentages of carbonate (as can be seen by making a rough preliminary test), 2 c.c. of strong hydrochloric acid and about 100 c.c. of water: 20 grams of soil should be used when the amount of carbonate is small. The acid may be conveniently added by making up a solution containing 100 c.c. of strong hydrochloric acid per litre, and introducing 20 c.c. of this solution along with 80 c.c. of water. For most soils, 5 c.c. of strong hydrochloric acid to 100 c.c. of water will be found convenient.

If possible distillation under reduced pressure should be used, as under this condition practically no decomposition of organic matter takes place, while carbonate is readily decomposed: the distillation should be continued for twenty minutes at a temperature of about 50° C.

Basic Slag owes its value as a source of phosphoric acid to the fact that it is essentially basic in its character, and can be used on land where an acid manure of the character of superphosphate is not to be recommended.

As no figures were available on the subject it seemed interesting to determine how much of the lime which it contains existed in the free uncombined condition. It has been stated that in some cases this is as much as 20%.

With a view to this determination four samples of freshly ground slag were obtained direct from the makers through the kindness of the Lawes Chemical Manure Company.

Bordeaux mixture has practically superseded every other fungicide for general use, and two or three sprayings with it have become part of the annual routine of the fruit grower in most countries except our own, whilst in viticulture, its use is quite indispensable, and potato growers are applying it more and more every year. Any means for simplifying or cheapening the application of it, are, therefore, of great importance.

It has recently been shown that the soil of some of the Rothamsted Grass Plots which have received ammonium salts for many years in succession has become distinctly acid and that, consequently, nitrifying organisms have become greatly reduced in numbers. Nitrification is limited to portions of soil directly in contact with the few particles of calcium carbonate still remaining in the soil. It is evident therefore that more or less of the nitrogen assimilated by the grasses must be in a form, or in forms, other than nitrate—probably mainly as ammonium salt. In view of these results it seemed desirable to obtain additional evidence of direct assimilation of ammonium salts by plants.

A study during 1907 and 1908 of various plots of wheat cut at three-day intervals leads to the following general conclusions:

(1) The whole plant, and with it the nitrogen, ash, and phosphoric acid it contains, increases in weight until about a week before it would be regarded as ready to cut. Some decrease of dry weight takes place during the last week.

(2) In the formation of the grain three stages may be distinguished:

(a) a period during which the pericarp is the most prominent feature,

(b) the main period during which the endosperm is filled,

(c) the ripening period characterised by the desiccation of the grain.

(3) For the filling of the endosperm each plant possesses as it were a special mould, and continually moves into the grain uniform material cast in that mould, possessing always the same ratio of nitrogenous to non-nitrogenous materials and ash. The character of the mould possessed by each plant is determined by variety, soil, season, &c.

(4) The main feature of the ripening process is desiccation rather than the setting in of such chemical changes as the conversion of sugars into starch, non-protein into protein, though the latter change also takes place.

(5) The maximum dry weight of grain is attained a day or two before the grain would be regarded as ripe by the farmer. Allowing for the fact that the tillered shoots are a little behind the central shoots, no loss of weight in the crop will be incurred by cutting before the corn appears quite ripe, while a number of accidental mechanical losses due to birds, shedding, weather, may thus be avoided. Other experiments have shown that, though there may be no gain, there will be no loss in the quality of the wheat due to such early cutting.