The purpose of the present paper is to give some account of experiments with oats, wheats, and barleys, carried out personally at St Andrews during the past five years.

Two pairs of young heifers were fed on a weighed and analysed diet, and their dung was sampled and analysed both in the fresh and in the rotted states.

It was found that the fresh dung contained about ¾ths of the nitrogen, ⅔rds of the phosphoric acid, and ⅞ths of the potash consumed by the animals in food and litter.

The dung made by the cake-fed animals was found to be more readily fermentable, and consequently more liable to loss during storage, than that made by the animals fed on roots and hay only.

The loss was found to fall chiefly on the ammoniacal nitrogen in which the cake-made dung is comparatively very rich.

Taking as a base-line the amounts of nitrogen and phosphoric acid in the dung of the animals fed on roots and hay only, it was found that the fresh dung of the cake-fed animals contained 82 per cent, of the nitrogen, and 70 per cent, of the phosphoric acid, of the cake they had consumed.

So great however was the loss of ammoniacal nitrogen from the cake-made dung, that after 6 months' storage under cover in the solid undisturbed state in which it was left in the boxes by the animals, only 37 per cent, of the nitrogen of the cake still remained in the rotted dung.

Dung is not usually kept so long as this, nor through such a hot time of the year, so that the average loss will probably be less than that found in the experiment, and ½ the nitrogen of purchased foods may very well be the average amount recovered in the dung.

The experiment shews however that, without any very flagrant mismanagement, the proportion recovered may fall considerably below ½, especially if the dung suffers further loss while lying on the surface of the land in dry weather.

While reading the two interesting papers on immune wheats in the last number of this Journal it occurred to us that our observations on rust resistant wheats in India might be of some interest. During the past two years a large number of varieties of Indian and European wheats have been grown by us at Pusa in Behar and at Lyallpur in the Punjab, one of the objects being to obtain wheats immune or at least resistant to rusts which would serve as parents in raising rust resistant hybrids. Biffen last year suggested that a trial should be made with Einkorn (Triticum monococcum vulgare, Kcke.), and kindly supplied us with a sample of the seed.

When the green parts of living plants are cut up and packed in a loosely covered vessel allowing entrance of air, mould soon makes its appearance and decomposition begins: the mass becomes alkaline and is ultimately converted into black humic bodies quite unfit for cattle food. But if air is excluded the change is fundamentally different; no mould developes, the temperature rises, the mass takes on a greenishbrown colour and characteristic odour, it becomes acid and for a long period is suitable for cattle food. The former is a putrefactive change, the latter gives rise to silage.

Experiments carried out at Ghizeh during 1905 and 1906 shew that the cotton plant follows Mendel's laws of gametic segregation in certain of its characters.

Soil which has been heated without drying to temperatures from 60° to 150° behaves unfavourably towards the germination of seeds, the total seeds germinating decreasing (in most cases), and the time necessary for their germination increasing, with the temperature of heating. The average results are sufficiently regular to show that the alteration in the soil must begin at temperatures as low as about 30°.

Sterilised seeds behave in the same way as unsterilised ones, except that the time required for germination is uniformly longer. This is due to an alteration in the seeds by the sterilising agent, and not to the destruction of bacteria, for sterilised seeds do not recover their property of ready germination on being re-inoculated. Various sterilising agents were examined, but mercuric chloride was the only one found to be satisfactory and efficient.

In Volume II. Part 2 of this Journal there appeared a note by W. L. Balls on the above subject, in which he states that “long lint is completely dominant over short.” This dominance, the present writer in India has found to occur in the case of crosses between many very different varieties. The question is not however so simple as it would appear to be from Mr Ball's statement “that the breeding of pure types suitable to the needs of the manufacturer and the cultivator will possibly prove a little difficult”; for though length of staple is on the whole dominant we often get seeds that carry both long and short cotton.

An indirect method of estimating the heat value of food stuffs, such as milk, is to determine the amounts of fat, sugar, and proteid chemically, and to multiply by the average caloric value of each; but since the amounts of these substances themselves indicate the quality of the milk their calculated caloric value need not be employed as a test of its quality.

The following is a brief summary of the more important points which our investigations so far appear to have given us:—

1. That white clover and ryegrass form by far the greater part of the herbage on the best grazing lands—both old and recent in the English Midlands—and that the next most abundant species on these pastures are usually crested dogstail, florin (A. stolonifera), and rough-stalked meadow grass.

2. That the herbage of the inferior types of grass land in the same district consists very largely of bent grass (A. vulgaris) and various weeds, while white clover and ryegrass are present in comparatively small quantities.

It is well known that at the beginning of the churning process a considerable volume of gas is evolved, necessitating some method of ventilation of the churn. In old-fashioned churns the gas was allowed to escape by simply withdrawing the cork or plug, while all modern churns have a special arrangement for the purpose. The gas set free has been stated to be carbon-dioxide, but hitherto no definite proof of its source or estimation of its amount has been recorded. It cannot very well be that the gas is formed by any chemical reaction at the time the churning process is going on. It seems more probable that it is produced by bacterial action during the ripening of the cream, held in a state of super-saturation by the liquid and released by the shaking in the churn in the presence of air. This view would account for the fact that it is only during the first hundred or so revolutions of the churn that any quantity of gas is evolved. It was with the object of demonstrating the correctness or otherwise of this latter theory that the following experiments were carried out.

It was shown in an earlier communication that the absorption of oxygen by soil is mainly brought about by the action of microorganisms, and is greatly diminished if the soil has previously been heated to 120ºC. On one occasion the temperature of the steriliser only rose to 95º, and it was found that the rate of oxidation of the soil, instead of being reduced, was considerably increased. This unexpected result led to experiments with other methods of partial sterilisation, such as exposure to vapours of toluene, chloroform, etc., and in each case the same effect was produced, the amount of oxygen absorbed showed a marked increase after the antiseptic was removed.

One of the most popular and commonly used methods of preserving eggs is by means of water glass. Though this method was introduced only comparatively recently it has largely superseded older methods, and also appears to have led to much more frequent preservation of eggs on the small scale in households and by small traders. The method is simple and effective. The eggs are obtained when they are plentiful and cheap in spring and preserved for use during the winter months. It is therefore necessary to keep them for about six months. In the experiments described below some were left in a solution of water glass as long as four years.

It is only quite recently that the perithecium, ascocarp or sporocarp, as it has been variously called, of the Erysiphaceae has been shown to possess a regular dehiscence accompanied by the ejection of the ascospores. We find the fact first recorded, I believe, by Worthington G. Smith, in 1884. In 1903 I independently observed the phenomenon in the same species, viz. Erysiphe Graminis DC., which Smith had studied. Smith's observations seem to have been entirely overlooked until attention was called to them in my paper in 1903, and up to this date the perithecium of the Erysiphaceae is described in nearly all text-books as a cleistothedum or cleistocarp, since it was supposed to remain closed until it decayed and ruptured to permit of the escape of the ascospores.