While science devotes its chief attention to industrial pursuits, a limited number of lovers of Nature, and a legion of workers whose very names will remain unknown to posterity, have created of late quite a new agriculture, as superior to modern farming as modern farming is superior to the old three-fields system of our ancestors.... Science seldom has guided them; they proceeded in the empirical way; but like the cattle-growers who opened new horizons to biology, they have opened a new field of experimental research for the physiology of plants. They have created a totally new agriculture. They smile when we boast about the rotation system having permitted us to take from the field one crop every year, or four crops each three years, because their ambition is to have six and nine crops from the very same plot of land during the twelve months. They do not understand our talk about good and bad soils, because they make the soil themselves, and make it in such quantities as to be compelled yearly to sell some of it: otherwise it would raise up the level of their gardens by half an inch every year. They aim at cropping, not five or six tons of grass on the acre, as we do, but from fifty to a hundred tons of vegetables on the same space; not L5 worth of hay, but L100 worth of vegetables of the plainest description--cabbage and carrots. Look now at these figures from America-- At a recent competition, in which hundreds of farmers took part, the first ten prizes were awarded to ten farmers who had grown, on three acres each, from 262 to 3463/4 bushels of Indian corn; in other words, _from 87 to 115 bushels to the acre_. In Minnesota the prizes were given for crops of 300 to 1120 bushels of potatoes to the acre, _i.e._ from 81/4 to 31 tons to the acre, while the average potato crop in Great Britain is only 6 tons. These are _facts_, not theories. Here is another quotation from Prince Kropotkin's book. It also relates to America-- The crop from each acre was small, but the machinery was so perfected that in this way 300 days of one man's labour produced from 200 to 300 quarters of wheat; in other words, the areas of land being of no account, every man produced in one day his yearly bread food. I shall only make one more quotation. It alludes to the intensive wheat-growing on Major Hallett's method in France, and is as follows:-- In fact, the 81/2 bushels required for one man's annual food were actually grown at the Tomblaine station on a surface of 2250 square feet, or 47 feet square, _i.e._ on very nearly one-twentieth of an acre.