The limits of this paper forbid the consideration of special fertilizers, but from the general principles laid down the rules for any special case may be deduced. A soil should contain a sufficient amount of potash, soda, lime, iron, and a few other minerals; phosphoric acid, nitrogen, organic matter, and, for some special crops, some other ingredients may be needed. When the soil needs renewing, there are two ways of accomplishing it. One way is to guess at what is needed; to buy fertilizers at high prices, without inquiring whether the soil needs the substances in that particular brand or not. Though very common, this is not a good plan. It is as though a physician were to give a patient any drug that was convenient, without inquiring into the disorder or the needs of the system, and it is followed by much the same result. That acid phosphate gave Farmer A a good crop, is no reason that Farmer B's land is also deficient in phosphorus. The same reasoning would teach that a heart stimulant that rouses a patient from shock would benefit one in danger of apoplexy, where the least increase in heart force might be fatal. A physician using such reasoning as the basis of his practice would not be considered a master of his art; and were he to attribute the fatal outcome of his logic to the poor quality of his stimulant, he would display criminal ignorance of drugs as well as disease; yet it is very common to see farmers put guano on a soil begging for potash, and then heap execration on the head of the dealer who sold the guano when the crop failed. To revert to a simile used above, a captain must not blame the salt pork for scurvy. The other way to buy and use fertilizers is to ascertain what a certain crop needs; then find out whether these be in the soil, and to what extent. With these data the deficiency may be made good without the wasteful cost of the former method. State and Federal Departments of Agriculture furnish their aid freely and gladly, and already the signs are seen of the day when agriculture will take its place among the semiexact sciences, and the present haphazard methods will become obsolete. FOOTNOTES: [46] An address delivered before the Richmond County (Georgia) Agricultural Society, on February 19, 1898. [47] United States Department of Agriculture. Farmers' Bulletin, No. 48. [48] Leguminous Plants for Green Manuring and for Feeding. E. W. Allen, Ph. D. United States Department of Agriculture. Farmers' Bulletin, No. 16. SKETCH OF AUGUST KEKULÉ. "This news," said Herr H. Landrelt, president, announcing Kekulé's death in the German Chemical Society at Berlin, "will be received with sorrow not only by our society but by the whole chemical world. Science has again lost one of its greatest representatives, one of those extremely rare spirits who were called upon to found a new epoch in it and push it mightily forward."