“These are the proportions to be used for the first year; for the second, and forward, two-thirds of that employed the first year will be sufficient. “When crops of tobacco and corn are grown on the same lands, half the guano should be applied to the corn and the other half to the tobacco; but then a somewhat larger quantity will be required. The manure should be applied shortly before transplanting, and after the ground has been well cross-ploughed and prepared, and the ground should be plotted out into squares or beds of 50 yards square. The manure should then be spread and ploughed in, and the land should at once be furrowed and planted. “Under this system of applying Peruvian guano as manure for tobacco the best results have been obtained, and, of all the various trials made, this is the most simple and the easiest to execute.” The remarks of the last-quoted essayist are good so long as guano is to be had. But there is a limit to the supply, and in many places it would be unprocurable. The necessity for more definite knowledge concerning the actual wants of the tobacco plant in the matter of food, led to an investigation of the subject some years ago by Prof. S. W. Johnson on behalf of the Connecticut State Board of Agriculture, and more recently by Schiffmayer for the Agricultural Department of the Madras Presidency. Prof. Johnson aptly observes it to be “a well-established fact that plants may receive from the soil and retain a larger portion of ash-ingredients than is needful for nutrition. This is especially marked in case of the lime, potash, and soda salts. The excess of these substances thus taken up may either be deposited in the solid state in the cells of the plant, or may remain dissolved in the juices. In tobacco, a part of the nitrogen usually exists as a nitrate, in combination with potash. That is to say, portions of the nitrogenous food of the plant—the nitrates of the soil—are not completely worked over into albuminoids, and into nicotine, the nitrogenous constituents of tobacco, but accumulate and remain in considerable quantity in the sap. When a dry tobacco-leaf is set on fire, it often burns like ‘touch paper’ (paper soaked in a solution of saltpetre and dried) with bright sparkles of fire, indicating the points where the nitre has gathered in minute crystals as the juice of the leaf evaporated. The quantity of superfluous salts in the plant depends upon its succulence, and upon the supply of them in the soil. Doubtless certain definite amounts of potash, lime, magnesia, iron, sulphuric acid and phosphoric acid are absolutely necessary to produce a given weight of tobacco. In case several or all these substances are superabundant in the soil, the plant has no power to exclude any unnecessary surplus of one or all of them from its interior altogether, although there are good reasons known to prevent their entrance beyond a certain limit. In one soil potash may be