Abstract
(1) A CONSIDERABLE change has come over the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society, during the last few years. Founded in 1839, its earlier numbers contained many papers of great scientific and practical interest, and the student of agricultural science frequently las occasion to refer back to them for the writings of Daubeny, Pusey, Way, Lawes and Gilbert, A. Voelcker, and others, of the great masters who contributed some of their best work to its pages. It cannot be said that recent numbers are up to the high standard of the older ones. Several causes have contributed to bring about this result. The journal only appears once a year, and men are often unwilling to hold back their papers from publication for so long a period. Much of the work done at the various colleges is directly or indirectly financed by county councils, who like to see something for their money; the results are therefore issued as separate bulletins by the councils or colleges concerned, and distributed among the farming community. Recently, too, some very vigorous competitors, including the Journal of the Board of Agriculture and the Journal of Agricultural Science, have arisen, and these publish much of what would, in the past, have found its way to the Royal Agricultural Society's Journal. The present volume is smaller in size even than the first one issued nearly seventy years ago!. There has been a considerable change in the character of the papers. The original paper has almost disappeared; there is, for instance, in this volume not a single contribution from the various teaching centres, if we exclude the report of the zoologist and Mr. Archibald's notes on certain birds, while Rothamsted only contributes a short note. Instead, the papers are of a “practical” or a textbook nature; they describe accepted good practice on certain matters, or give information which, could be found elsewhere if the reader knew where to look for it. There is much to be said for this, and the utility of some of the papers in the present volume is beyond question, but it is doubtful whether this is quite the best line to take up. The journal would almost certainly be more valuable to the practical man if it aimed at furnishing him with a record of the progress of agricultural knowledge in its various branches so that he could apply the newly discovered facts to his own methods, if he thought he would gain thereby, and be in possession of definitely established principles to guide him whenever it became necessary profoundly to modify his practice, as' happened to many of the wheat-growers a generation ago, and is happening to the hop-growers now. Such a record would include a critical survey, of the numerous county council feeding and manurial trials, of progress in soil management, plant breeding, in bacteriology, in our knowledge of plant and animal requirements, so far as practical agriculture is concerned, besides dealing with questions of cost and with practical methods ascertained, to give. good results and worthy of wider trial.
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R., E. Some Recent Agricultural Publications. Nature 78, 188–189 (1908). https://doi.org/10.1038/078188a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/078188a0