Are Fertilizers Stimulants?--Some words carry with them their own popular condemnation. We are accustomed to draw a sharp line between foods and stimulants, and to condemn the latter. To stimulate is to rouse to activity. Tillage does not add one pound of plant-food to the soil, and its office is to enable plants to draw material out of the soil. It makes activities possible that convert soil material into crops. Fertilizers add plant-food directly to the soil, and it is also to their credit that their judicious use favors increased availability in some of the compounds already in the soil. The greater part of the labor put on land is designed to make plant-food available, either by providing moisture, or ease of penetration of plant-roots, or activity of bacteria, or other means that will permit plants to remove what they need for growth. Fertilizers supply fertility directly and indirectly, but it is their direct service in meeting a deficiency in plant-food that affords all needed justification for their use by practical farmers. Referring to the thirty years' soil fertility experiments of the Pennsylvania station, Hunt says that they "show that there is nothing injurious about commercial fertilizers. For thirty years certain plats in this experiment have received no stable manures. No organic matter has been added to the soil except that which was furnished by the roots and stubble of plants grown. These plats are not only as fertile as they were thirty years ago, but they have yielded, and continue to yield, as good crops as adjacent plats which have received yard manure every two years in place of commercial fertilizer." Soil Analysis.--There is wide misconception regarding the value of chemical analysis of the soil as an aid in making choice of a fertilizer. Analysis has shown that some soil types are relatively richer in plant-constituents than are others, and it has shown abnormal deficiency in some types of limited area. It has given us more knowledge of soils, but as a guide to fertilization in particular instances it usually has no value. The samples used by an analyst are so small that the inaccuracy in his determination may easily be greater than the total amount of plant-food in a very heavy application of commercial fertilizer. A field that has been reduced to temporarily low productive power by heavy cropping or bad farming methods may show a greater content of plant-food than another field that is in a highly productive condition. This is a fact difficult of acceptance by some who want the aid of science, but such are the present limitations. The weight of a fertilizer application is so small in comparison with the weight of the surface part of an acre of land that the use of a ton of fertilizer may not be detected in the analyst's determinations, and moreover his determinations of actual availability in the soil's supplies are not serviceable in the selection of a fertilizer for any particular field and crop.