Note 63 — Chapter III · THE POSSIBILITIES OF AGRICULTURE.

Already it is partly removed in France and Belgium, owing to the public laboratories where analyses of seeds and manure are made free. The falsifications discovered by these laboratories exceed all that could have been imagined. Manures, containing only one-fifth part of the nutritious elements they were supposed to contain, were found to be quite common; while manures containing injurious matters, and no nutritious parts whatever, were not unfrequently supplied by firms of “respectable” repute. With seeds, things stand even worse. Samples of grass seeds which contained 20 per cent. of injurious grasses, or 20 per cent. of grains of sand, so coloured as to deceive the buyer, or even 10 per cent. of a deadly poisonous grass, passed through the Ghent laboratory.