is used in arguments favoring certain methods of tillage.

Professor Stockbridge, in 1879, at the Massachusetts Agricultural
College, carried on very valuable and full experiments in test of this
general belief, and arrived at results contradictory of this belief. He
found, in a multitude of tests, that in every instance, save one, for
the months from May to November, that the surface soil from one to five
inches deep, was warmer than the air instead of cooler, as the law
requires for condensation of moisture from the air. That exception was
in the center of a dense forest, under peculiar atmospheric conditions.
After noting these facts, ingenious methods were employed to test more
directly the proposition that soil gains moisture from the air by night,
with the result that he announced that soils lose moisture by night.
Professor Stockbridge's efforts met with some criticism, and his
conclusions did not receive the wide acceptance that his view of the
question justifies. In reasoning from observation, Professor Stockbridge
noted that the bottom of a heap of hay, during harvesting, would be wet
in the morning, the under side of a board wet in the morning, and so of
the other objects named. In the progress of tillage experiments related
in his Bulletins Nos. 3 and 5, Prof. Sanborn's attention was again
called to this question, resulting in the prosecution of direct tests of
the soil moisture itself. When completed it is thought that there will
then no longer be occasion to reason from assumed premises regarding the
matter. The trials were begun late, and under disadvantages; and are to
be understood as preliminary to more complete tests during 1884. The
experiments were all conducted upon a soil bare of vegetation.

Prof. Sanborn concludes from his experiments thus far that the surface
gains moisture from soil beneath it by capillary action, but gathers
nothing from the air. This is made strongly probable, if not shown;