Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1871 [PAGE 327]

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319 have one plat, or one-twentieth of an acre, which would produce one bushel of corn more per year than the one adjoining it, and were to put on your manure before you had ascertained that fact, your experiment as to the manures, or comparison of manures, would be entirely vitiated, or partially so. The object, therefore, is to plant, year after year, as far as may be thought best, these different plats without manure, and ascertain their relative productiveness. If they prove equal in productiveness, all well and good, or if they do not prove equal in productiveness, we want to know it, and to what extent they are unequal. Having ascertained that fact, your committee then suppose we are ready to go on and apply manure, and by the results to decide to what extent it has been affected by those manures. The President—In these preliminary experiments, you do not design any comparison between the plats of one institution and those of another. Mr, Flagg—We thought not. I would call the attention of the gentleman from Wisconsin to this fact, that while it may be desirable on many accounts to use certain particular varieties of corn over the whole extent of country over which we hope to range, yet it would be practically impossible, because the corn growing in different latitudes varies so much in its characteristics and its wants. The comparison that we wish to make is simply to ascertain the fact in the first place, whether this variation of soils adjoining one another is found throughout the country that we have under experiment, and whether they all vary in this way. Mr. Miles—It makes no difference in regard to the distance apart, provided it is uniform. It matters not about the variety of corn. What might be a certain variety in one State might be different in another State. Let each one select the kind that will grow best. We can ascertain then whether the soils in one locality are more local to those varieties than those in other localities. Mr. Welch—I move we now adjourn to half-past one o'clock. The motion was adopted, and the Convention adjourned.