Fifty Years of Field Experiments at the Woburn Experimental Station

Abstract

CROP husbandry, the first occupation of man, which must ever remain essential to the maintenance of human life, has been pursued through all the ages as an art and a craft. The bearing of science upon it is a very recent development which is probably still only in its initial atages. Crops grow in vital association with two media, the air and the soil. It is barely a century ago that, following the discovery of photosynthesis, the main facts about the relationship of the crop to the air became generally known. The essential facts about the relationship of the crop to the soil are “still clouded in mystery. In spite of all the development in the study of plants on one hand and of soils on the other, very little is known of the relationship of one to the other, and we are still largely dependent upon empirical experiments in order to determine the effect upon the plant of any particular treatment of the soil. Moreover, as this account of the Woburn experiments shows very clearly, the successful conduct of empirical experiments is beset with great difficulties.

Fifty Years of Field Experiments at the Woburn Experimental Station

By Sir E. John Russell Dr. J. A. Voelcker; with a Statistical Report by W. G. Cochran. (Rothamsted Monographs on Agricultural Science.). Pp. xvi + 392 + 4 plates. (London, New York and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., Ltd., 1936.) 21s. net.