adulterated, and those who have suffered from frauds are hostile to
the entire class. In their strong prejudice, they will neither
discriminate nor investigate. There are others who associate
everything having a chemical sound with "book farming," and therefore
dismiss the whole subject with a sniff of contempt. This clique of
horticulturists is rapidly diminishing, however, for the fruit grower
who does not read is like the lawyer who tries to practice with barely
a knowledge of the few laws revealed by a limited experience. In
contrast, there are others who read and theorize too exclusively, and
are inclined to assert that concentrated fertilizers supersede all
others. They scout the muck swamp, the compost heap, and even the
barnyard, as old-fashioned, cumbrous methods of bringing to the soil,
in tons of useless matter, the essentials which they can deliver in a
few sacks or barrels. On paper, they are scientific and accurate. The
crop you wish to raise has constituents in certain proportions. Supply
these, they say, and you have the chemical compound, or crop. A field
or garden, however, is not a sheet of blank paper, but a combination
at which nature has been at work, and left full of obscurities. The
results which the agricultural chemist predicted so confidently do not
always follow, as they ought. Nature is often very indifferent to
learned authorities.

There is yet another class--a large one, too--who regard these
fertilizers as they do the drugs of an apothecary. They occasionally
give their land a dose of them as they take medicine themselves, when
indisposed or imagining themselves so. la either case there is almost
entire ignorance of the nature of the compound or of definite reasons
for its usefulness. Both the man and the field were "run down," and
some one said that this, that, or the other thing was good. Therefore
it was tried. Such haphazard action is certainly not the surest method