Rocks and Soils

Abstract

CHEMIST to the Hokkaido Cho! It is not the least striking feature of our time that there should be an Imperial College of Agriculture at Sapporo whose Professors publish researches in New York and London. This is not exactly a novel experience, for events crowd upon us thick and fast in these days; but those of us who can look back forty years must be struck when confronted with the Chemist of the Hokkaido Cho. Dr. Stockbridge is not, be it understood, the alchemist to an Eastern potentate, nor yet one of the astrologers, Chaldæans, or soothsayers of a modern Belshazzar, but an agricultural chemist and geologist discoursing upon rocks and soils, nitrates and microbes, and suggesting processes by which atmospheric nitrogen is fixed in the soil by the action of living organisms. The great Mikado, “virtuous man,” has, we know, transplanted full-grown and fully-equipped knowledge from the West to his remote dominions; and so successfully, that it has rooted, and now is become an article for exportation—as witness the volume before us. To some of our readers it may appear unnecessary to dilate upon a fact which springs naturally out of the most recent developments of civilization. We need not now despair of openings for aspiring young chemists under the protection and pay of the King of Dahomey or of Ashantee, or of an Imperial Institute at Khartoum or some other part of the Dark Continent; and truly the missionaries of science are in a fair way to rival those of religion in their ubiquity.

Rocks and Soils: their Origin, Composition, and Characteristics.

By Horace Edward Stockbridge, Professor of Chemistry and Geology in the Imperial College of Agriculture, Sapporo, Japan; Chemist to the Hokkaido Cho. (New York: John Wiley and Sons. London: Trübner. 1888.)