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Hem ^ork 
 
 ^>Utt (ftoUegs nf Agriculture 
 
 J^t (Catnell UniUEraitH 
 
 ffitbrarg 
 
A MANUAL OF THE 
 ELECTRO-CHEMICAL 
 TREATMENT OF SEEDS 
 
A MANUAL OF THE 
 ELECTRO-CHEMICAL 
 TREATMENT OF SEEDS 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES MERCIER, M.D. 
 
 F.R.C.P., Etc. 
 
 "He gave it for his opiaion that whoever could make two 
 ears of com, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot 
 of ground where only one grew before, would deserve 
 better of mankind, and do more essential service to his 
 country, than the whole race of politicians put together." 
 A Voyage to Brobdi7ignag. 
 
 LONDON 
 UNIVERSITY OF LONDON PRESS, LTD. 
 
 i8 WARWICK SQUARE, E.C.4 
 1919 
 
PREFACE 
 
 When I first heard, about a year ago, of the 
 electrification of seeds, and was told that it 
 produced an increase in the crop grown from 
 seed so treated, I naturally put the statement 
 down as moonshine. My information came, 
 however, from persons of standing and ex- 
 perience in the world of agriculture, who 
 had, as far as I knew, no axe to grind, and 
 were evidently convinced of the truth of 
 their belief ; and it seemed worth while, 
 therefore, to investigate the evidence in 
 order to undeceive them, for the thing was 
 on the face of it incredible. 
 
 Fortunately, no knowledge of agriculture 
 was needed. All that was necessary was 
 ability to investigate evidence in a proper 
 critical spirit — and the critical spirit was 
 certainly not wanting. But soon a wonder 
 
vi ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 came to light. The further I carried my 
 investigations, the more difficult I found it 
 to maintain my sceptical attitude. At length, 
 being in danger of a conversion parallel with 
 that of Balaam the son of Beor, and mistrust- 
 ing my own judgment, I induced several 
 parties of experienced agriculturists, occupy- 
 ing responsible positions, to visit the fields 
 at harvest-time and form their own opinions. 
 These gentlemen, experts appointed by foreign 
 governments, agricultural correspondents of 
 influential newspapers, landowners cultivat- 
 ing thousands of acres of their own land, 
 and so forth, accordingly visited the farms, 
 and examined the crops growing from 
 treated and untreated seed side by side. In 
 not one case was the opinion adverse to the 
 process. In nearly every case it was very 
 favourable, and in some it was enthusiastic. 
 
 After this, I was obliged to revise my 
 attitude ; and having regard to the serious 
 shortage of food that threatened, and still 
 threatens, not this country only, but the 
 whole world, I determined to spread the 
 
PREFACE vii 
 
 knowledge of the process as widely as I 
 possibly could. 
 
 It was true that the process was patented, 
 and that I was not financially interested in 
 it ; but I did not see that the financial benefit 
 that my efforts might bring to the inventor 
 was any reason why the country should not 
 reap full benefit from the invention. If 
 the labourer is worthy of his hire, surely 
 the inventor is worthy of his reward. Seven 
 years of strenuous work and the expenditure 
 of thousands of pounds may surely look 
 for some reward without being considered 
 sordid. 
 
 CHAS. MERCIER. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 PACE 
 
 I. HISTORY .... 
 
 I 
 
 2. THE PROCESS . 
 
 22 
 
 3. RESULTS .... 
 
 39 
 
 4. FAILURES. 
 
 74 
 
 5. DISADVANTAGES 
 
 92 
 
 6. HORTICULTURAL SEEDS 
 
 99 
 
 7. THE EXPLANATION . 
 
 107 
 
A MANUAL OF THE 
 ELECTRO -CHEMICAL 
 TREATMENT OF SEEDS 
 
 CHAPTER 1 
 
 HISTORY 
 
 The application of electro-chemistry to 
 agriculture and horticulture is quite new. 
 The application of electricity to plants for 
 the purpose of stimulating their growth is 
 indeed of long standing. Forty years ago 
 Sir William Siemens applied electricity to 
 growing crops, and was followed by the 
 Berthelgts, father and son, who conducted 
 long series of experiments. Later still, 
 other physicists took up the matter, and 
 of late years it has even attracted the 
 attention of the Board of Agriculture, in 
 whose journal records of experiments have 
 
ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 appeared from time to time since 19 lo. It 
 is important to keep in mind the difference 
 between the application of electricity alone 
 to growing crops and the application of an 
 electro-chemical process to seed before it is 
 sown. The distinction is clear enough, but 
 the two processes are constantly confused, 
 and the electro-chemical process is supposed 
 to be the same as the electric process, or a 
 mere unimportant variation of it. 
 
 In- the electric process, no application of 
 electricity is made to the seed before germin- 
 ation takes place. In the electro-chemical 
 process, the sole application of electricity 
 is made to the ungerminated seed. In the 
 electric process, chemicals are not used : 
 electricity alone is applied to the crop. In 
 the electro - chemical process, the seed is 
 steeped in a solution of some metallic salt, 
 and the passage of the electricity through 
 the solution drives the ions of the salt into 
 the seed. The process is not solely electri- 
 cal, but is electro-chemical, inasmuch as it 
 utilises electricity to produce a chemical 
 
fercier^ s Electrification of Seeds, 
 
 t ■ 
 
HISTORY 
 
 result, though it must be understood that 
 this is not the whole result. In the electric 
 process, the electricity is not applied until 
 the plant has appeared above ground, and 
 is then applied more or less continuously 
 throughout the whole period of growth 
 of the plant. It is discontinued at night, 
 and in rainy weather, but is applied daily, 
 as far as weather will permit, from the time 
 of appearance of the plant above ground 
 until harvest. In the electro-chemical pro- 
 cess, the electricity is applied to the seed 
 once for all, before it is even sown. It 
 is passed through the seed alone for a few 
 hours, and then the operation is at an end. 
 In the electric process, posts are set up on 
 the ground on which the crop is grown, 
 wires are carried from post to post, and 
 electricity must be brought into the farmer's 
 fields. In the electro-chemical process, the 
 farmer's fields are not invaded. The ap- 
 paratus may be miles away ; the farmer has 
 nothing to do with the matter except to 
 send his seed to the electrifying station ; 
 
4 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 and after he has received it back, again, all 
 his farming operations proceed in the usual 
 manner. A project is now on foot for 
 sending a travelling apparatus round to the 
 farms, so that even the necessity of sending 
 away the seed to be treated will be abolished. 
 From what has been said it will be seen 
 that the two processes are entirely different, 
 having nothing whatever in common but 
 the use of electricity — and even this is used 
 at a very different amperage and voltage. 
 
 The application of electricity to grow- 
 ing crops has been tried experimentally by 
 various experimenters for at least forty years. 
 The application of an electro-chemical pro- 
 cess to seeds is quite new. Until Mr Fry 
 began his experiments about seven years ago, 
 it does not appear that any attempt had been 
 made to apply such a process to seeds, or to 
 use any electrolytic process in agriculture or 
 horticulture. 
 
 The inventor of the Wolfryn electro- 
 chemical process had been for many years 
 interested in electricity, and had directed his 
 
-u 
 
 Paris and London Photo 
 Mr Hill's Works at Poole for electrification of seeds — Exterior. 
 
6 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 attention to the production of high-tension 
 electricity by means of steam, turning to 
 practical use a discovery of Faraday's that 
 had lain neglected ever since his experi- 
 ments revealed the possibility. Mr Fry 
 designed an apparatus by which he w^as 
 able to produce at very small cost oscillating 
 currents of enormous tension, up to as high 
 as 100,000 volts. The apparatus was so 
 successful and so cheap that it afforded 
 means of equipping every tramp steamer 
 with a wireless apparatus, and in fact was 
 used successfully on an experimental scale 
 by one of the steamers of the Great 
 Western Railway Company plying between 
 Weymouth and the Channel Isles. The 
 Admiralty sent down members of its wire- 
 less department to investigate the matter, 
 and successful trials were made. When 
 this point was reached, however, and a great 
 future appeared to be opened out for the 
 application of the invention, it was found 
 impossible to use it without employing 
 transmitters and receivers that were already 
 
HISTORY 
 
 protected by Marconi's patents, and it was 
 necessary to abandon the project, at any rate 
 until these patents had lapsed. 
 
 It was then suggested to Mr Fry that he 
 should turn his attention to the application 
 of electricity produced by steam to growing 
 crops. He knew of what had been done in 
 this direction, and on mature consideration 
 he arrived at the conclusion that, however 
 experimentally successful the application of 
 high-tension currents to growing crops might 
 be, the expense of the application was such 
 that it could not be made economically bene- 
 ficial, and he made no attempt to pursue this 
 matter. But his mind having been directed 
 to the application of electricity to agri- 
 culture, it occurred to him to try its effect 
 upon seed. If, as appeared to be established, 
 electricity exerted a beneficial effect upon 
 the growth of plants in their maturer stages, 
 it was possible, and even probable, that it 
 might stimulate the germination of seeds 
 also. This was a fairly obvious inference ; 
 but it was a much longer step, and one that 
 
8 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 few would have thought of making, to con- 
 jecture that the electrification of seed before 
 it is sown might produce such a change in 
 the seed as to cause it to germinate earlier 
 when subsequently sown, and to produce a 
 more healthy, vigorous, and fertile plant. 
 This was a totally new conception. There 
 were no known facts either in support of it 
 or in conflict with it, and the only thing to 
 be done was to follow the maxim of John 
 Hunter — Don't think : try. 
 
 Here, however, occurred the first difficulty. 
 If currents of high tension, such as the in- 
 ventor had been experimenting with, were 
 passed into the grain, the apparatus required 
 would be very expensive and complicated 
 and would need an expert to work it. It 
 would be desirable, therefore, to use ordinary 
 low-tension electricity. But ordinary low- 
 tension electricity would not have the pene- 
 trating power of high-tension electricity, 
 and would not be able to penetrate the seed 
 without the aid of a conducting medium. 
 Such a medium would be furnished by a 
 
Murder's Electrification of Seeds. 
 
 Pitrh and London J'/ioto Agency, 
 
 Oats grown by Mr Legg, Blashenwell Farm, Corfe Castle. Electrified on the 
 left, unelectrified on the right. The number of straws in each bundle is 
 the same. Note the much stouter straw grown from electrified seed, the 
 longer panicles, and the much more numerous spikelets on each panicle. 
 
HISTORY 
 
 solution of some metallic salt, and hence the 
 advisability of steeping the seed in such a 
 solution, and of passing the electricity through 
 the seed while it is immersed. The current 
 would of course have an electrolytic effect 
 on the solution, would decompose it and 
 drive its ions into the seed immersed in it. 
 Hence the process would no longer be a 
 purely electrickl process : it would become 
 in part a chemical process ; it would be 
 electro -chemical. And thus the electro- 
 chemical treatment of seeds originated. 
 
 If a solution of a salt must be used, it 
 was natural to choose first those that are used 
 for the purpose of chemical manures, the 
 most soluble of which are sulphate of am- 
 monia and nitrate of soda, and these are also 
 fairly abundant and fairly cheap. Nitrate 
 of soda was first used. Wheat was steeped 
 in a solution of the salt, electricity of low 
 tension was passed through it for a good 
 many hours, and then the wheat was sown 
 in large pots, at the same time with un- 
 treated wheat in other pots, filled with 
 
lo ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 similar soil, for control, and the two were 
 placed side by side in the open air for com- 
 parison. The result was awaited with a 
 good deal of curiosity ; and when it was 
 found that in all the pots of treated wheat 
 the seeds germinated earlier than in the 
 control pots, it appeared that the treatment 
 had produced some effect ; and this impres- 
 sion was confirmed later on, when the plants 
 from the treated seed grew stronger, taller, 
 and produced better ears and more of them. 
 Here was a beginning that encouraged further 
 investigation. It seemed to show that the 
 process was worth following up. It held out 
 hopes of good results to be obtained in time. 
 In the following season more numerous 
 trials were made. Oats and barley were 
 added to the seeds experimented on. Larger 
 quantities were treated. Solutions of several 
 different salts were employed, and in each 
 solution different lots of seeds were treated 
 for different lengths of time. The quantities 
 treated were now too large to be sown in 
 pots, and a piece of arable land was set 
 
HISTORY 1 1 
 
 aside and marked out into plots, on each of 
 which a sample of the electro-chemically 
 treated corn was sown, a neighbouring plot 
 being in every case sown with untreated 
 seed of the same sample at the same time, 
 for comparison and control. Again when 
 harvest time came round the results were 
 decidedly encouraging : the electrified seed 
 gave better crops than the controls. But 
 the results were not uniform. Some of the 
 plots showed better results than others, and 
 reference to the records afforded an indica- 
 tion as to what length of treatment, what 
 strength of current, what kind of solution, 
 and so forth, afforded the best result. 
 
 It is evident that the permutations and 
 combinations of these several factors are 
 very numerous ; and as the three kinds of 
 seed, wheat, oats, and barley, were experi- 
 mented on, the number of experiments was 
 trebled. In each solution, and in each separ- 
 ate strength of solution, different samples of 
 each seed were treated for half an hour, for 
 an hour, for an hour and a half, for two 
 
12 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 hours, and so on, and with different strengths 
 of current. The several samples were then 
 sown, always with a control plot sown at 
 the same time, and the results awaited. The 
 method was very tedious, since only one 
 crop could be raised in each season, and 
 there was no previous experience, there were 
 no former experiments of the same kind, 
 to take for guidance : the inventor was 
 obliged to begin at the very beginning. 
 
 Little by little the conditions were nar- 
 rowed down. Little by little the proper 
 treatment began to emerge ; and the first 
 conclusions were rather surprising. .It was 
 found that, although the seeds of wheat, 
 oats, and barley are so much alike in size, 
 shape, consistency, and in all belonging to 
 the same natural order of Gramines, yet 
 they did not respond to the treatment in the 
 same way. In order to secure the best 
 result in barley, it had to be treated for 
 twice as long as oats, which it so closely 
 resembles. It was found that the constitu- 
 tion of the electrodes made a material dif- 
 
Mercier's Electrification of Seeds. 
 
 Paris and London Photo As'^ncy. 
 
 Oats grown by Mr R. S. Hunt, in the same field at Poundbur}' 
 Farm, Dorchester. The electrified (on the left) were sown 
 a fortnight after the unelectrified (on the right). The same 
 number of straws in each bundle. 
 
HISTORY 13 
 
 ference, iron electrodes producing a better 
 effect than carbon. It was found that com- 
 mon salt made a very good medium, though 
 not the best, to steep the grain in ; and it 
 was found that seed treated in solution of 
 one salt was better adapted to one kind of 
 soil, and produced a better crop when sown 
 therein than the same seed when treated in 
 a solution of a different salt ; while with 
 other soils the success was reversed. Evi- 
 dently the affair was becoming extremely 
 complicated. Hundreds of experiments 
 were made every season, and the total 
 number is now very large ; but still, even 
 for the three staple cereals there is yet 
 much to be discovered, and the investigation 
 of the proper treatment of horticultural seeds 
 is scarcely more than begun. Enough has 
 been done with them to show that when 
 full investigations have been made, and the 
 proper treatm'ent for each seed determined, 
 results as good as those already obtained with 
 cereals may be confidently expected. But up 
 to the present the main efforts of the inventor 
 
14 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 have been concentrated upon determining 
 with accuracy the best treatment for cereals; 
 and when it is borne in mind how many 
 factors are to be determined, and that the 
 right combination of all these factors must 
 be separately determined for each kind of 
 seed in each kind of soil, the wonder is, not 
 that so little has been determined for horti- 
 cultural seeds, but that so much has been 
 determined with respect to cereals. 
 
 Even for cereals much remains to be 
 done. There are something like 150 dif- 
 ferent kinds of wheat in cultivation, and it 
 is quite probable that, although every kind 
 of wheat yields superior crops when treated 
 in the manner ascertained as appropriate for 
 wheat in general, yet each kind would yield 
 better results still if it received a special 
 treatment peculiarly suited to its own 
 peculiar constitution. It will be seen, there- 
 fore, that the investigation is practically 
 endless, and that many years must elapse 
 before the treatment that is perfectly ap- 
 propriate to all the common garden seeds is 
 
HISTORY 15 
 
 known. On the other hand, it must be 
 remembered that all that has been achieved 
 at present has been achieved by the efforts 
 of but a single investigator, working at first 
 in the dark, and doing everything, from the 
 preparation of the soil to the sowing and 
 harvesting of the seed, for himself. From 
 his numerous experiments principles are 
 beginning to emerge into view. It is be- 
 ginning to be possible to say, " Seed of this 
 kind will take about so long to treat ; such 
 and such a combination of salts will be 
 found, if not the best, yet somewhere near 
 the best " ; and so forth. As these principles 
 become more clearly and firmly established, 
 the time occupied in investigating the treat- 
 ment of any particular kind of seed will be 
 shortened ; and when many investigators 
 are employed in a college with a proper 
 staff of subordinates to undertake the routine 
 duties, investigation will proceed faster still. 
 But it is not possible at present to look 
 forward to a time when such a staff will 
 come to the end of its labours. 
 
1 6 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 The kinds of seeds used in agriculture 
 alone are numerous, and those used in horti- 
 culture are perhaps twenty, perhaps fifty 
 times as numerous ; and of all these, only 
 three, the staple cereals grown in this 
 country, have been sufficiently tested to 
 warrant the commercial use of the process 
 upon them. There are other cereals, such 
 as rye, millet, sesame, rice, etc., whose 
 treatment is not yet determined, and the 
 determination of the treatment of even the 
 commonest of horticultural seeds is scarcely 
 yet begun. 
 
 It is scarcely begun, and for none of these 
 seeds has the correct mode of treatment been 
 fully ascertained. But something has been 
 done ; some trials have been made, and for 
 some of these seeds the trials have been 
 fairly extensive, and up to the present no 
 seed has been found that has not benefited 
 by electrification. Applications have been 
 made from distant parts of the world for 
 trials to be made upon rice, sugar-cane, 
 cotton, flax, and other seed ; and though, as 
 
HISTORY 17 
 
 has been said, the application of the process 
 to these seeds has not been worked out in 
 detail, yet up to the present no kind of seed 
 has been found that does not respond to 
 the treatment by producing a more vigorous 
 plant, richer and superior in quality in some 
 respect for which it is cultivated. This 
 is especially true of cotton, tobacco, root 
 crops such as mangels, turnips, and swedes, 
 cabbages, tomatoes, and some others. All 
 these crops are grown as annuals, and are 
 harvested within a twelvemonth after they 
 are sown ; and it is probable that for such 
 crops the process will be found more bene- 
 ficial than for crops that do not come to 
 maturity until after a longer interval from 
 sowing time, such as orchids, pepin fruits 
 (apples and pears), citron fruits (oranges, 
 lemons, and citrons), bush fruits (raspberries, 
 gooseberries, currants), brambles (black- 
 berries, logan-berries, wine-berries), and 
 other cultivated crops. We do not yet 
 know whether these crops of a longer 
 maturation period will be benefited by the 
 
1 8 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 process, but all of them are occasionally 
 grown from seed for the production of new 
 varieties, and at present the process is a very 
 tedious one, for years elapse before the plant 
 grown from hybridised seed reaches the 
 fruiting stage, so that the qualities of its 
 fruit can be estimated. If, as may fairly be 
 anticipated, this period of waiting can be 
 shortened by a season or two, it is evident 
 that the commercial advantage will be 
 considerable. 
 
 It has been said above that crops grown 
 from seed that has been treated by the 
 electro-chemical process are superior both in 
 quantity and quality to those grown from 
 untreated seed of the same sample. The 
 quality of corn is estimated by its weight, 
 and a small difference in the weight of a 
 bushel indicates a considerable difference in 
 the quality of the corn. A poor sample of 
 wheat weighs 60 lbs. per bushel, an average 
 sample 62 or 63 lbs. per bushel, a fine sample 
 64 lbs. per bushel, and 65 lbs. per bushel 
 is an extraordinarily fine sample, such as is 
 
Merciers Electrification of Seeds. 
 
 Paris and London Photo Agency. 
 
 Oats grown by Mr Roseveare, Gains Cross Farm, Blandford. Electrified 
 on the left, unelectrified on the right. The same number of straws in 
 each bundle. The straw from the electrified seed is stouter and longer, 
 the panicles larger, and the spikelets more numerous. 
 
HISTORY 19 
 
 seen only in exceptional seasons. Now, the 
 increase in weight observed in wheat grown 
 from electrified seed varies from i to 4 lbs. 
 per bushel. It is evident, therefore, that 
 the use of the process not only increases the 
 bulk of the crop, but also so improves its 
 quality that it may command a higher price 
 per bushel, yield more flour and less ofFal, 
 and that wheat that would otherwise be fit 
 for milling purposes alone may become fit 
 for seed. 
 
 This is a sample of the improvement in 
 quality, but it is only a sample. Cotton 
 grown from electrified seed produces a 
 longer staple, and length of staple is one 
 of the most important qualities of cotton. 
 On the other hand, tobacco grown from 
 electrified seed produces immense leaves 
 that are not always of as good a quality 
 as the smaller leaves grown from unelectri- 
 fied seed. 
 
 It is not only true seeds that yield better 
 crops when electrified. Potatoes also yield 
 a more abundant crop when the " seed " 
 
20 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 potatoes have been subjected to the process 
 before they are set in the ground, and 
 experiments are now being made with 
 bulbs. Though the increase in the crop 
 of potatoes has been very pronounced, it 
 has not been constant. Sometimes the crop 
 produced from electrified potatoes has shown 
 a diminution, showing that in these cases 
 the process had not been properly performed 
 and that the true conditions required by 
 potatoes had not been observed. The same 
 untoward result was occasionally produced 
 in the early experiments on cereals, before 
 the best conditions had been ascertained ; 
 and there is no reason to doubt that as 
 soon as the best conditions for electrifying 
 potatoes have been ascertained, success in 
 increasing the crop will be as uniformly 
 secured with potatoes as it already is with 
 cereals. For the moment, however — that 
 is, until another season has passed and pro- 
 vided its experience, — the expectation with 
 respect to increase in the crop of potatoes 
 can be looked on only as extremely promis- 
 
Merciers Electrification of Seeds, 
 
HISTORY 2 1 
 
 ing, not as assured. The inventor will, 
 however, welcome the trial of experimental 
 plots of electrified potatoes, provided always 
 that unelectrified seed potatoes of the same 
 sample are planted at the same time, in the 
 same field, and under the same conditions, 
 so that a fair comparison can be made. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE PROCESS 
 
 The nature of the process has already been 
 sketched. It is the passage of a weak 
 current of electricity for a certain length of 
 time through the seed, the duration of the 
 treatment varying with the kind of seed 
 treated. As a weak current of electricity 
 will not pass through dry seed, the seed 
 must be steeped in water ; and as a weak 
 current will not pass readily through tap 
 water, some salt must be dissolved in the 
 water to render it conductive. Any salt 
 will render the water a conductor, but not 
 every salt produces the same effect upon 
 the seed. The salts most readily procured 
 are common salt and chloride of calcium, 
 and with these the majority of the experi- 
 
24 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 ments have been made and the whole of 
 the farmers' seed has been treated. Other 
 salts have been tried, and remarkable effects 
 have followed ; but most of the experiments 
 have been conducted during the war, and 
 the war has made some salts too expensive for 
 use upon a large scale, and has made others 
 altogether unprocurable. Hence common 
 salt (chloride of sodium) and chloride of 
 calcium have been the salts used. The 
 solutions have been used at a strength of 
 from 2 J to 5 per cent., the solid being taken 
 by weight and the liquid by "measure, so 
 that I oz. of salt is used for each pint of water, 
 ^ lb. for each gallon. The quantity of the 
 solution required is 5 gallons or more per 
 bushel of seed, so that a charge of 50 sacks of 
 seed would require 1000 gallons of solution. 
 In practice, the solution and the seed are 
 best contained in an oblong shallow tank, 
 which may be of wood, or concrete, or 
 brick faced with cement. In any case, the 
 internal angles should be rounded, to facili- 
 tate the removal of every grain of seed when 
 
Aferczer's Electrification of Seeds » 
 
 Paris and London Photo Agency. 
 
 Oats from the same field. Electrified on the left, unelectrified 
 on the right. The same number of straws in each bundle. 
 The difference is conspicuous. 
 
THE PROCESS 25 
 
 the operation is over, and the floor should 
 slope from all directions to a drain, the 
 aperture of which must be closed by a wire 
 grid, to prevent the escape of the seed when 
 the liquor is drawn off by opening a valve 
 in the course of the drain. 
 
 A tank of the inside measurement of 6 ft. 
 6 in. X 3 ft. X 2 ft. deep will treat 4 sacks at 
 one charge. A tank 8 ft. x 4 ft. x 2 ft. 6 in. 
 deep will take a charge of 10 sacks. A tank 
 10 ft. X 5 ft. X 3 ft. will take a charge of 20 
 sacks ; and so on. As a matter of practical 
 convenience it is found better to have several 
 small tanks than one large one. 
 
 Each end of the tank is completely faced 
 on the inside with an iron plate ^ inch 
 thick, which serves as an electrode, and to 
 these plates the wires conveying the elec- 
 tricity are attached. 
 
 The source of the electricity may be a 
 dynamo installed for the purpose, or it 
 may be a town supply. In either case a 
 switchboard is necessary, with a rheostat 
 for regulating the current. The quantity 
 
26 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 of electricity employed for most seeds is 
 about 8 watts per gallon of fluid used. A 
 good working rule is to allow 2 amperes 
 per square foot of acting surface of one 
 electrode. The tanks may be ranged in series 
 or in parallel, as may be most convenient. 
 
 After the seed has received its proper 
 quantum of current, which varies much 
 according to the kind under treatment, the 
 liquor is run off and the seed is taken out 
 and conveyed to the drying apparatus. 
 
 Wet seed cannot be sown. It sticks 
 together, and if an attempt is made to sow 
 it broadcast it falls in lumps instead of in 
 separate grains, and for the same reason it 
 will not pass through the drills. Even if 
 not wet, but only damp — though the seed 
 may be sown if not very damp, — it is swollen, 
 will not pass through the drills at all unless 
 they are suitably adjusted, and even then 
 will not pass regularly and equally. More- 
 over, a farmer must sow his seed, not when 
 he would, but when he can — that is to say, 
 when he has produced a good seed-bed, and 
 
28 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 when the weather is favourable. It is rare, 
 therefore, for a farmer to be able to sow his 
 seed the day that he receives it, and if it is 
 kept in a damp state it may heat, so that its 
 germinating power is destroyed ; or it may 
 sprout, and become unsowable ; or, if neither 
 of these accidents happens, it is sure to become 
 mildewed, and thereby injured. For all these 
 reasons it is necessary to dry the seed. 
 
 But there is another cogent reason. It 
 is well known to practical farmers that the 
 drying of damp seed equalises and stimulates 
 its germination, and the crop is shghtly 
 improved if the seed is merely soaked and 
 then dried. The crop is still further im- 
 proved if the seed is dried after being 
 soaked in certain chemical solutions ; and 
 the improvement has been occasionally such 
 that the inventor of the electro-chemical 
 process has taken out a patent for the process 
 of soaking in chemicals and drying. But 
 this was done chiefly as a safeguard, for 
 the resulting improvement is never so great 
 as is obtained by the additional process 
 
Mercier's Electrification of Seeds. 
 
 Paris and London Photo Agency. 
 
 Barley grown by Mr Roseveare, Gains Cross Farm, Blandford. Elec- 
 trified on the left, unelectrified on the right. Note the longer and 
 thicker straw, and the much longer and plumper ears of the 
 electrified grain. 
 
THE PROCESS 29 
 
 of electrification, and when once the seed 
 is in the salted liquor, and the necessary 
 expense of subsequent drying has been in- 
 curred, it adds little to the trouble or the 
 expense to pass a current of electricity 
 through the seed, and thus gain the maxi- 
 mum of benefit. 
 
 The seed must be dried, and the drying 
 is very important. If the seed is not 
 sufficiently dried, it not only loses the 
 benefit that is derived, as has just been 
 mentioned, from being dried, but it may 
 become mildewed or mouldy or otherwise 
 damaged. On the other hand, if it is dried 
 too much it may be killed outright. Every 
 organised structure, every part of an animal 
 or vegetable body, contains a certain share 
 of moisture, and if deprived of this moisture 
 it dies. Seed corn contains naturally from 
 II to 14 per cent, of moisture, and if it is 
 deprived of this residual moisture it dies. 
 It is important, therefore, that the seed 
 should not be over-dried. 
 
 The method usually employed for the 
 
30 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 drying of various substances is the applica- 
 tion of heat, and it is usually supposed that 
 the application of heat is sufficient by itself 
 to extract or drive the moisture out of the 
 heated substance ; and many commercial 
 appliances for drying are constructed on the 
 principle that heating is sufficient for drying. 
 This is a mistake, and is in some appliances 
 a very costly mistake. Heat is a useful 
 assistant and adjuvant to drying, but heat 
 by itself is totally useless. 
 
 If we fill a vessel with water and then 
 close the vessel air-tight, so that nothing 
 can escape, it is manifest that we may heat 
 it to any degree we please and the water 
 will not escape so long as the vessel is strong 
 enough to withstand the pressure. Or if, 
 instead of water, we fill the vessel with wet 
 clothes or wet corn or any other wet sub- 
 stance, the same is true. ' If we heat the 
 vessel, the wet clothes or the wet corn will 
 be heated, but will not be dried. They will 
 not be dried, for the moisture cannot escape, 
 and when the vessel is opened, the only 
 
THE PROCESS 31 
 
 difference will be that the clothes or the 
 corn, instead of being cold and wet, will be 
 hot and wet. They will still be as wet 
 as ever. 
 
 On the other hand, everyone knows the 
 drying effect of a March wind. A peck of 
 March dust is worth a king's ransom, and 
 fortunately there is usually much dust in 
 March, and dust is dry — very dry. How 
 is it that this soil which was moist, un- 
 pleasant mud yesterday is dry dust to-day ? 
 It has not been heated. March wind is not 
 hot : it is very cold — nothing makes one 
 shiver as March wind does. But yet it is 
 a most powerful drier. Why ? Manifestly 
 because, though it is not hot, it is dry. 
 
 If a thing is wet — that is to say, if it 
 has moisture adhering to its surface — this 
 moisture may be removed by wiping, or by 
 blotting, or by centrifugalising, or by evapora- 
 tion ; but if the substance is damp — if, that is 
 to say, the moisture is not in the surface but 
 inherent in the texture of the substance — then 
 this moisture can be removed by evaporation 
 
32 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 into the air and in no other way. The 
 
 moisture in the substance is under tension — 
 
 that is to say, its particles are in movement, 
 
 and in the course of this movement they are 
 
 constantly coming to the surface and tending 
 
 to fly off. Whether or not they will fly off 
 
 depends entirely upon whether there is room 
 
 for them in the adjacent air. Air can hold 
 
 a great deal of water vapour, but cannot 
 
 hold an indefinitely large quantity ; and 
 
 when it is full, it can hold no more. If we 
 
 put a moist substance into air that is saturated 
 
 with moisture, the substance will not dry ; 
 
 but if the air is not saturated, it will take 
 
 up moisture until it becomes saturated ; and 
 
 the drier it is, the more rapidly it will take 
 
 up moisture, and the more rapidly a moist 
 
 substance placed in it will become dry. 
 
 But, of course, as the moisture escapes from 
 
 the substance into the air, the air becomes 
 
 more and more charged with moisture, takes 
 
 up the water from the substance more and 
 
 more slowly, until at length it becomes 
 
 saturated and will hold no more. Then 
 
34 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 drying ceases. If we wish the drying process 
 to continue, we must either substitute a new 
 portion of dry air, or we must extract the 
 moisture from the air to enable it to take 
 up more. Both methods are effectual in 
 practice. In practice it is found that a 
 current of air — that is to say, the constant 
 renewal of the moist air — dries a substance 
 much more rapidly than stagnant air ; and 
 in practice it is found that even stagnant air 
 will dry a substance completely if we furnish 
 the air with some hygroscopic substance, 
 such as chloride of zinc, or sulphuric acid, 
 which will extract the moisture from the 
 air as fast as it enters the air. 
 
 But there is another way of drying the 
 air besides extracting the moisture from it. 
 Warm air will hold more moisture than cold 
 air, and the hotter the air, the more moisture 
 it will hold ; so that hot air, even though it 
 actually contain more moisture than cold air, 
 may be relatively drier, and able to absorb 
 more moisture. Hence the best possible 
 condition for drying is a current of hot air. 
 
Mercier's Electrification of Seeds. 
 
 Paris ciiid London Photo Agency. 
 
 Wheat grown by Mr Roseveare, Gains Cross Farm, Blandford. Electrified 
 on the left, unelectrified on the right. The straw grown from electrified 
 seed is stouter, and the ears are longer and plumper. 
 
THE PROCESS 
 
 ?>S 
 
 Heat has yet a further effect in aiding the 
 process of drying, though by itself it is, as 
 we have seen, useless. It increases the 
 activity of the particles of moisture in the 
 damp substance, and helps them to fly off 
 from its surface into the surrounding air. 
 Hence we arrive at the optimum conditions 
 for drying, and find that drying will take 
 place most rapidly when the body to be dried 
 is placed in the most rapid current of the 
 hottest air. 
 
 In the case of seed grain, very hot air 
 must not be used, for above a certain 
 temperature the grain is killed. We must 
 therefore depend mainly upon the rapidity 
 with which the air can be changed, and let 
 this air be of the maximum permissible 
 temperature, which is about loo degrees F. 
 
 After the electrification of the seed is 
 completed, therefore, the next process is to 
 raise the seed out of the soaking tank, 
 preferably in baskets, so that the surface 
 moisture may drain away, and then to 
 deposit it in an apparatus in which it is 
 
36 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 subjected to a blast of air at loo degrees P., 
 either driven or drawn through the mass of 
 seed, until it is dried to the proper degree 
 of desiccation. One effect of the war has 
 been to diminish very much the quantity of 
 beer that has been brewed, and the conse- 
 quence of this has been that a large number 
 of malt-kilns have been put out of use. 
 Many of these have been utilised for the 
 purpose of drying electrified seed, and have 
 answered the purpose very well. Owing 
 to the shortage of every kind of labour, 
 however, it has not always been possible 
 to engage the services of skilled maltsters ; 
 and a malt-kiln requires skilled supervision. 
 Thus it has happened that in some cases 
 the seed has not been properly dried, and 
 some failures are attributable to this cause. 
 Fortunately, the cause is no longer in 
 operation, and no fiirther accidents of this 
 kind need be anticipated. 
 
 The process is now complete, and the 
 seed may be sown. It should be sown 
 promptly, for the effect of the electrification 
 

38 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 is not permanent. Under ordinary circum- 
 stances, and if the seed is kept meanwhile 
 in a dry place, the effect lasts for about a 
 month. It has upon occasion lasted for 
 considerably longer, but it cannot be de- 
 pended on to do so, and it is unsafe to defer 
 the sowing for more than a month. After 
 this period, though some effect may be 
 obtained, the full effect will not be obtained, 
 and the trouble and expense will be to some 
 extent wasted. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 RESULTS 
 
 The electrification of seed improves in 
 many ways the crop grown from it. In 
 most cases it improves the crop in those 
 ways that are commercially desirable ; but 
 in a few cases it has produced a result that, 
 while increasing the quantity of the crop, 
 has increased it in a way that is commercially 
 undesirable. For example, the quantita- 
 tive yield of tobacco leaf has been much 
 increased ; but, in fine tobacco, what is 
 wanted is not so much increase in bulk as 
 improvement in quality. A smaller leaf of 
 better quality is of more value commercially 
 than a huge rank leaf. The result actually 
 produced has been the latter — a much larger 
 leaf, but of inferior quality. It is by no 
 
 39 
 
40 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 means necessary or inevitable, however, that 
 the result should be of this character. It 
 must be remembered that, with all seeds but 
 those of cereals, the process is in its infancy, 
 and we are far yet from knowing all its 
 possibilities. 
 
 In this connection, a recent experiment 
 on peas is highly significant. Leguminous 
 plants of all kinds are refractory to the 
 process, which has hitherto produced little 
 result upon any of them. They have there- 
 fore been electrified in various ways and in 
 various solutions, and the effect of one of 
 these experiments on pea Duke of Albany 
 was very remarkable. Duke of Albany is a 
 pea that grows to a height of about four feet, 
 and in light soil has rather light-coloured 
 foliage, the leaves being about two inches in 
 diameter. In the experiment in question, a 
 row of fifteen yards in length was sown, as 
 to one half, with peas electrified in a certain 
 manner, while the other half was sown with 
 untreated peas out of the same bag as a 
 control. The control seeds all grew as 
 
42 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 normal Duke of Albany's, of the usual 
 height, colour, and size of leaf. The elec- 
 trified peas threw up plants that grew to 
 only about eighteen inches in height, were 
 of a very dark green colour, and their 
 leaves were no larger than half-crowns. 
 The pods were about the usual size, and 
 contained the usual number of peas, but 
 were of much darker colour than those of 
 the controls. Now peas, garden peas at 
 any rate, are grown solely for their seeds, 
 and, except in colour, the seeds of the 
 treated plants were not very different from 
 those of the controls ; but if the peas had 
 been grown as some plants — coleus, for 
 instance — are, for depth of colour, they 
 would have taken a prize at any show ; 
 and if they had been grown for the flavour 
 of their foliage, as tested either by eating 
 or by smoking, it can scarcely be supposed 
 that this flavour would not have been 
 altered, and enhanced. It seems, therefore, 
 that, by modifying the electric treatment 
 of the seed, we can to some extent guide 
 
RESULTS 43 
 
 the resulting alteration of the crop in the 
 direction we desire. 
 
 All this, however, is matter for future 
 experiment, and will take years to determine. 
 At present the potentialities of the process 
 have been determined only for wheat, oats, 
 and barley, and even for these probably only 
 in part. In them, however, it has been 
 wholly beneficial, and has resulted in in- 
 creasing the yield in just those respects that 
 are economically desirable. 
 
 In the first place, the quantity or bulk 
 of the grain is increased, and is usually 
 increased to a very material extent ; in the 
 second place, the quality of the grain is 
 improved ; and in the third place, the straw 
 is increased in length, in weight, and in 
 stoutness. All these results are commerci- 
 ally valuable, and it would be very desirable, 
 if it were practicable, to give in figures, in 
 bushel measures, in pounds and hundred- 
 weight avoirdupois, and in percentages, the 
 advantage in yield of the crops from electri- 
 fied seed over the crops from seed that has 
 
44 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 not been electrified. It would seem to the 
 uninstructed that this must be a very easy 
 thing to do, and that, out of the hundreds 
 of cases in which electrified seed has been 
 grown by farmers for profit, some scores at 
 least of weighed and measured results should 
 be available for citation. But those who 
 form such an anticipation know little of the 
 nature of the farmer, and, as the scarcity 
 of weighed and measured results must tell 
 against the right estimation of the process, 
 it may be as well to explain here the kind 
 of man the farmer is, so as to account for 
 this scarcity. A mere mention or a brief 
 explanation will look like an excuse ; and 
 this is no excuse. It is a good, sound, 
 valid reason. 
 
 Farmers are notoriously a conservative 
 race, slow to adopt new ideas, new pro- 
 cesses, new implements, and new materials ; 
 and there is good reason for their conserva- 
 tism. Agriculture is the oldest of all 
 industries, and one of the most complex 
 and difficult to master and to pursue with 
 
RESULTS 45 
 
 success. It is so much at the mercy of 
 the capricious forces of nature that it is 
 impossible for even the ablest farmer to 
 pursue it with constant success. Farming 
 requires more intelligence than any other 
 industrial occupation, the reasons being two. 
 In the first place, the farmer's task is with 
 living things, which are indefinitely more 
 difficult to mould to his purposes than are 
 the inanimate materials dealt with by the 
 engineer, the miner, the ironmaster, the 
 textile worker, the builder, or the cabinet- 
 maker. In the second place, the opera- 
 tions that he must conduct are much more 
 numerous and diverse than need to be 
 pursued by one man in any other industry. 
 The operator in a factory may pass a life- 
 time in doing nothing else but fashioning 
 the heads of pins, or attending to the regular 
 movements of a group of spindles or looms. 
 Such operations call for little skill, little 
 intelligence, and that all of one kind, and 
 a very limited kind ; but the agricultural 
 labourer's duties vary with every day in 
 
46 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 the year, and every hour in the day. He 
 must " plough and sow, and reap and mow, 
 and be a farmer's boy." His work is with 
 living things ; and living things, whether 
 animal or vegetable, cannot be managed 
 by coercion. They must be humoured. 
 They must be understood. They must be 
 studied individually. Unlike inanimate sub- 
 stances, they have their likes and dislikes. 
 Unlike inanimate substances, they are sub- 
 ject to competition, both from one another 
 and from other live things. The plants of 
 wheat in a wheat-field have rivals in one 
 another, and a competitor in every weed 
 that grows near them ; and the live stock 
 similarly compete with one another — aye, 
 and sometimes bully one another, so that 
 one will monopoHse the best pasture, and 
 another will be left to get what he can. 
 The living things by which the farmer 
 makes his liveHhood are subject to diseases, 
 many of them infectious ; must be increased 
 by reproduction, a mysterious process ; are 
 subject to laws of heredity but little under- 
 
RESULTS 47 
 
 stood ; and throughout the whole of his 
 operations the farmer finds himself every- 
 where confronted with mystery. In such 
 circumstances it behoves him to walk 
 warily, and to think twice before he leaves 
 the old ways, trodden smooth by the feet 
 of innumerable predecessors, and therefore 
 tried and safe. They may not lead to 
 astonishing and dramatic success, but at 
 least they are sure not to lead to dire 
 disaster ; so he goes in the old ways. 
 Besides this, the farmer is of necessity 
 keenly observant. His whole livelihood 
 depends daily and hourly on the keen- 
 ness and faithfulness of his observation of 
 a thousand things that the townsman is 
 utterly blind to. At an agricultural show, 
 a townsman can see no difference between 
 the winner of the champion cup and the 
 beast that is but commended ; but to every 
 farmer present they are wide as the poles 
 asunder. The farmer is keenly observant, 
 and has a tenacious memory. Both are 
 necessary in his business ; and the farmer 
 
48 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 is not slow to observe the blunders com- 
 mitted by his would-be teachers, and not 
 quick to forget them. No class of men 
 in the world is so prone to mistrust the 
 amateur ; and it must in justice be said 
 that no class of men in the world has better 
 reason. Among amateurs, the professional 
 farmer reckons the professor of agriculture, 
 whose experiments are regarded with disdain, 
 and whose advice is received with sceptical 
 indifference ; and in this again the farmer 
 is not without justification. An instance 
 will suffice. 
 
 Professors used to make merry over a 
 queer superstition entertained by farmers 
 that there was a strong connection between 
 the disease of wheat known as rust, and the 
 presence of barberry bushes in the hedges 
 of the wheat-field. Rust, they said, appears 
 on wheat, if not solely where there are 
 barberries in the hedges, yet much more 
 frequently in such fields, which are also 
 subject to more virulent attacks. Over 
 this "irrational superstition" the professors 
 
RESULTS 49 
 
 made merry, until it was found that rust 
 is a fungus ; that, like many fungi, it passes 
 through different stages in its existence ; and 
 that one of these stages is passed upon the 
 barberry. When this discovery was made, 
 it was the farmers' turn to laugh, and it gave 
 them a pull upon the professors, and a dis- 
 trust of their judgment, which remain to this 
 day ; for farmers not only are keen observers, 
 as the incident shows, but also have tenacious 
 memories. 
 
 In comparison with the town-dweller, the 
 farmer leads a solitary life. His neighbours 
 are few, and are comparatively far away ; and, 
 having fewer opportunities of human inter- 
 course, he has fewer gifts of expression. 
 He feels his way to his modes of action by 
 dint of accumulated experiences, and reason- 
 ings that he never puts into words, so that 
 he seen:is to reach his decisions by a sort of 
 instinct ; but his decisions are usually right, 
 and founded on good reason, though he may 
 be unable to put his reasons into words. 
 He shares with other professional men a 
 
 4 
 
so ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 contempt for the amateur and for the out- 
 sider who offers advice, and perhaps he feels 
 this contempt more than men of other 
 professions, and this for two reasons. He 
 feels more than men of other professions 
 the vital necessity of experience, and the 
 uselessness of instruction that is not ac- 
 companied by experience ; and he has, in 
 that tenacious memory of his, not a few 
 instances in which the advice of outsiders 
 has proved to be wrong. He has seen 
 the amateur and inexperienced agriculturist 
 suffer heavy lo§s by the premature adoption 
 of methods that have been insufficiently 
 tried ; and thus he acquires a distrust of 
 all new methods — a distrust that he is apt 
 to carry too far. 
 
 For these reasons it was not easy to induce 
 farmers to try the method of submitting 
 their seeds to the electro-chemical process. 
 It was new, it was strange, and it was 
 recommended by an outsider who was not 
 a farmer, and had no experience of agricul- 
 ture ; but, under a certain amount of pressure 
 
RESULTS 51 
 
 from his employer, a farmer was at last 
 prevailed upon to try it. He tried it, but 
 he tried it with a firm and settled conviction 
 that it was useless and would turn out to be 
 a failure. It is not too much to say, for he 
 has himself admitted, that he wanted it to 
 be a failure, and therefore he made no effort 
 to make it succeed. But much to his 
 surprise it did succeed. Its success was 
 undeniable, and upon a second trial he was 
 less sceptical and more inclined to give a 
 fair chance to the new process. Again it 
 was successful, and now he pursued it in 
 good earnest. He put up a plant to treat 
 his own seed under the supervision of the 
 inventor, and is now become an enthusiastic 
 advocate of the new process. 
 
 Farmers pay little attention to the advice 
 of inexperienced outsiders, and their reluc- 
 tance is natural, and is usually not unwise ; 
 but they pay much attention to the experi- 
 ence of other farmers, and are always wilUng 
 to try a method that has been found success- 
 ful by their neighbours. Farmers meet at 
 
52 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 markets and at ordinaries and talk over 
 farming affairs, and in this way a knowledge 
 of the electro -chemical process and the 
 practice of employing it spread from farm 
 to farm in the neighbourhood in which it 
 was invented and first employed. For 
 several years this was the only way in which 
 it spread, for the inventor himself is as 
 cautious as a farmer, and was unwilling to 
 make his invention publicly known until it 
 was proved and proved and better proved, 
 until it was proved up to the hilt and could 
 not be gainsaid. This stage is now reached, 
 and he has been induced at length, under 
 some little pressure, to make it known to 
 the world. 
 
 But now arose a difficulty from the general 
 practice of farmers. It has been said that, 
 owing to the circumstances of their lives, 
 they have little gift of expression. Their 
 lives are passed out of doors, in actual con- 
 tact with things, and it is irksome to them 
 to sit down, after an exhausting day's work 
 in the open air, and commit their thoughts 
 
RESULTS 53 
 
 to paper. Their memories serve them well 
 enough, and they see no necessity to call in 
 the aid of pen and paper to assist them. 
 For this reason farmers are not good book- 
 keepers. They keep in their minds general 
 results rather than accurate figures, for 
 which they see no necessity, and which 
 consume time and energy that, as it seems 
 to the farmer, would be better employed in 
 other work. If he sees, as he is quick to 
 see, that a certain manure or a certain mode 
 of cultivation produces a material increase 
 in his crop, that is enough for him. He 
 sees no necessity to weigh and measure the 
 result to determine precisely how many 
 pounds or bushels he has gained. He is a 
 busy man. He is always short of labour. 
 Weighing and measuring on the large scale 
 required by farm crops are tedious processes, 
 and consume much labour and time, often 
 at the busiest season of the year. It is only 
 during the last four years, the years of war, 
 when labour has been scarce almost to the 
 point of famine, that the electro-chemical 
 
54 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 process has been used by farmers ; and it is 
 only in a very small fraction of the cases in 
 which it has been used that weighed and 
 measured results have been obtained. Even 
 of' these, a considerable proportion would 
 not have been obtained if an independent 
 expert, quite unconnected with the farmers, 
 had not been sent by the Board of Agri- 
 culture to visit several farms for the express 
 purpose of investigating the results of the 
 process, and had not himself measured off 
 portions of the crops with scientific accuracy, 
 reaped them, threshed them, and weighed 
 and measured the proceeds. General im- 
 pressions of the value of the process, opinions 
 in its favour, descriptions of the superiority 
 of the crops resulting from it, the inventor 
 has in plenty ; but weighed and measured 
 results are few. As far as they go, however, 
 they are almost uniformly in favour of the 
 process ; and when we take into account the 
 inevitable uncertainty and apparent caprice 
 of the results of farming operations, when 
 we allow for the disturbing influences, some 
 
RESULTS ^5 
 
 of which will be enumerated on a subsequent 
 page, the general uniformity of benefit that 
 has resulted from the use of the process is 
 such as to establish its value beyond the 
 shadow of a doubt. 
 
 In previous years failures were mingled 
 with successes. As seasons went by, and 
 as with each season the process was better 
 understood and its details perfected, the pro- 
 portion of successes to failures increased. 
 The reasons of the failures were discovered 
 and provided against, until in the harvest of 
 1 9 1 8 failures — by which is meant failure to 
 secure a more valuable crop from the treated 
 than from the untreated seed — were almost 
 entirely eliminated. 
 
 The following are the measured and 
 weighed results reported up to the present 
 as obtained in the harvest of 191 8 : — 
 
 [Table 
 
56 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 Gain per 
 Acre in 
 Grain. 
 
 Gain per Acre 
 in Straw. 
 
 1 . Mr W. W. Lovelace, 
 
 Puddlehinton, Dor- 
 chester. 
 
 2. Mr C. Foot, Bin- 
 
 combe, Dorchester. 
 
 3. Mr H. H. Caice, Bin- 
 
 combe, Dorchester. 
 
 4. Mr H. Legg, Blashen- 
 
 well, Corfe Castle. 
 
 5. Mr W. W. Lovelace, 
 
 Puddlehinton. 
 
 6. Messrs S. & H. Smith, 
 
 Rollington, Corfe 
 Castle. 
 
 7. Mrs Duke, Godman- 
 
 stone. 
 
 Wheat, 
 7 bushels. 
 
 Wheat, 
 6^ bushels. 
 
 Barley, 
 1 6 bushels. 
 
 Oats, 
 
 18 bushels. 
 
 Oats, 
 6 bushels. 
 
 Oats, 
 
 19 bushels. 
 
 Barley, 
 2 bushels loss. 
 
 2 tons 8 cvft. 
 
 Loss I cwt. 
 Gain 9 cw^t. 
 Gain 10 cwt. 
 Gain 4 cwt. 
 
 Loss 5 cwt. 
 
 Gain about 
 33 per cent.* 
 
 * The straw was estimated by the farmer when the 
 whole field was threshed. 
 
 These results were obtained by the in- 
 dependent expert already mentioned. In 
 addition, the following have been reported 
 by the farmers concerned : — 
 
RESULTS 
 
 57 
 
 8. Mr S. Hawkins, 
 
 Whitestone, Exeter. 
 
 9. Mrs Duke, Godman- 
 
 stone. 
 
 10. Mr A. H. Moore, 
 
 Woodlands Park, 
 Leatherhead. 
 
 11. Mr Godwin, More- 
 
 ton, Dorset. 
 
 12. Mr R. S. Hicks, Wil- 
 
 braham Temple, 
 Cambs. 
 
 13. Mr Stidson, Thurle- 
 
 ston, Devon. 
 
 14. Mr W. T. Maye, 
 
 Charlton, Dorset. 
 
 15. Mr A. T. Cock, Ford 
 
 Farm, Lispeard. 
 
 16. R. S. Hicks, Esq., 
 
 Wijbraham Temple, 
 Cambs. 
 
 Gain per 
 Acre in 
 Grain. 
 
 Wheat, 
 8 J bushels. 
 
 Wheat, 
 y^ bushels. 
 
 Wheat, 
 5| bushels. 
 
 Oats, 
 12 bushels. 
 
 Oats, 
 
 5 bushels. 
 
 Barley, 
 50 per cent. 
 
 Barley, 
 21 per cent. 
 
 Wheat, 
 12 bushels. 
 
 Mangels, 2 
 tons 15 cwt. 
 
 Gain per Acre 
 in Straw. 
 
 20 per cent. 
 
 It is true that this is but a meagre list in 
 comparison with the 1 50 farmers who reaped 
 
58 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 last year corn grown from seed treated by 
 the Wolfryn process, but the reasons for the 
 scarcity of measured and weighed results 
 have already been given ; and these reports 
 have been supplemented by a chorus of 
 approval, expressed in general terms, which 
 it is scarcely worth while to reproduce. It 
 may be mentioned, however, that of 27 
 farmers supplied by Messrs Holman & Sons 
 in this, their first season, every one has 
 reported that his yield of grain was much 
 larger from the treated than from the un- 
 treated seed, but that, owing to scarcity of 
 labour, he was unable to give weighed and 
 measured results. 
 
 Through other electrifying stations the 
 inventor has received fewer reports from 
 farmers ; but he is not disheartened by this. 
 It is no libel on farmers to say that, if the 
 results had been unsatisfactory, the agents 
 who electrified the seed, and were paid for 
 doing so, would certainly have heard of it. 
 In this case, at any rate, no news is good 
 news. It would not be true to say that no 
 
RESULTS 59 
 
 complaints have been received. There have 
 been a very few ; but in every case, without 
 any exception, in which the result has been 
 disappointing, it was found on investigation 
 that a manifest error had been made in 
 the application of the process. Either the 
 operator was inexperienced and misunder- 
 stood his instructions, or there was some 
 oversight, or some fault in the apparatus. 
 In the most efficient factories mistakes are 
 made. The best workmen sometimes spoil 
 their work ; and, though the process of 
 electrifying seeds is a very simple process, 
 men are fallible and will sometimes make 
 mistakes ; apparatus is of human construc- 
 tion and will sometimes break down or get 
 out of order — and then things will go 
 wrong ; but in no case has failure been traced 
 to the process itself. Whenever there has been 
 a failure — and, since the process is carried 
 out by human agency, there have been a 
 few — the failure has without exception been 
 traced to faulty execution. 
 
 Of the fourteen results of growing electri- 
 
6o ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 fied corn that are given above, one-half were 
 obtained by an official who investigated the 
 matter on behalf of the Food Production 
 Department of the Board of Agriculture. 
 This gentleman spent about a fortnight over 
 his investigations among the farms of Dorset- 
 shire on which electrified seed was growing 
 alongside of unelectrified seed from the same 
 bulk. His method was to measure ofF two 
 plots of two perches each, one plot on each 
 side of the dividing line between the two 
 crops. The two plots were so close together 
 as to minimise any chance of difference in 
 the character of the soil on which they were 
 grown (see pp. -jj etseq.), and all the farmers 
 agreed that there was practically no differ- 
 ence. Each plot was reaped as close as 
 possible to the ground, and the resulting 
 crop was then carefully threshed, weighed, 
 and measured. About these results, there- 
 fore, there can be no possible doubt ; and 
 it is noticeable that six out of the seven 
 showed a positive advantage in favour of 
 the electrified seed, and the average advan- 
 
RESULTS 6 I 
 
 tage was very considerable. Of the seventh 
 case, in which no advantage appeared, I 
 shall have something to say later on. 
 
 The official made his report to the Food 
 Production Department, but this report has 
 not yet been published, and presumably will 
 not now be published ; but the Department 
 has composed the following Memorandum, 
 which it issues to members of the public 
 who inquire as to the merits of the Wolfryn 
 process : — 
 
 Food Production Department — Technical Committee. 
 
 Wolfryn Electro-Chemical Treatment of Seeds. 
 
 This process is understood to consist in passing 
 a regulated electric current through a tank con- 
 taining a weak solution of some neutral salt, such 
 as common salt, in which the seed undergoing 
 treatment is steeped. 
 
 Pot experiments with treated barley and oats 
 made at the Rothamsted Experimental Station in 
 191 8, at the request of the Technical Committee, 
 gave a result slightly in favour of the treatment in 
 the case of oats, but negative in the case of barley. 
 
62 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 The process has gained some popularity among 
 farmers, particularly in Dorsetshire ; in the latter 
 county it is stated that over 2000 acres were 
 under treated crops in 191 8'. A member of the 
 Technical Committee, accompanied by the Execu- 
 tive Officer of the Dorsetshire Agricultural 
 Executive Committee, visited certain crops and 
 reported that on the date of inspection (July 1 8th) 
 the treated crops in most cases appeared to give 
 the heavier yields. This view was supported by 
 actual weighings of small areas of certain of the 
 crops made later on behalf of the Committee. 
 The weighings showed an increased yield of corn 
 in six out of seven cases (wheat, barley, and oats) 
 varying from 240-900 lbs. per acre, and a decrease 
 in the seventh case (barley). Potatoes gave a de- 
 creased yield in four cases out of the five selected. 
 
 In interpreting these results it must be remem- 
 bered that the weighings were made on small plots, 
 that the plots were not in duplicate, and that, as 
 far as the Committee are aware, no special steps 
 were taken to secure uniformity in the soil on 
 which the trials were made. 
 
 On the information at their disposal the Com- 
 mittee are not in a position to come to any definite 
 conclusion on the claims put forward for the pro- 
 cess ; but, assuming that the treatment does actually 
 increase the yield of the resulting crops, it would 
 
RESULTS 63 
 
 still be impossible to say at present whether such 
 results were due to the treatment as a whole, in- 
 cluding the effect of the electric current, or whether 
 equally good results might not be obtained by 
 either soaking the grain in the appropriate fluid 
 (or water) for a suitable period with subsequent 
 drying, or by drying the grain at a suitable 
 temperature without the previous soaking or elec- 
 trical treatment. Experiments are in progress 
 with a view to securing information on these 
 points. 
 
 Technical Committee, 
 
 Food Production Department, 
 
 72 Victoria Street, S.W. i. 
 
 It will be seen that the Memorandum 
 contains a certain amount of fact, but this 
 is enveloped in so much commentary that 
 the facts are obscured, to some extent thrust 
 out of sight, and to some extent minimised 
 and depreciated. If we strip away this 
 commentary and allow the facts to stand by 
 themselves, they are as follows : — 
 
 In six cases out of seven, the crops from 
 the electrified seed showed an important 
 advantage over the crops from unelectri- 
 fied seed. 
 
64 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 The amount of the advantage ranged 
 from 240 lbs. to 900 lbs. of grain per acre; 
 or from 5 bushels 20 lbs. to 16 bushels 
 4 lbs. per acre ; or from 8 per cent, to 
 61 per cent. 
 
 The average gain in yield of grain was 
 10^ bushels, or more than 2^ sacks per 
 acre. 
 
 The money value of this increase is, at 
 present prices, from £2, 4s. 3d. to £y, 12s. 
 per acre, with an average profit of ^^4, i6s. 
 after deducting the cost of electrification. 
 
 These are the facts as ascertained, recorded, 
 and published by the Board of Agriculture, 
 and the facts need no commentary. 
 
 But the explanations, surmises, and doubts 
 by which the facts are overlaid and obscured 
 do need some commentary ; and the com- 
 ments that I venture to make upon them 
 are these : — 
 
 When divested of unnecessary verbiage 
 and put in plain terms, the comments of 
 the Board of Agriculture, or of its Food 
 Production Department, or of th? Technical 
 
RESULTS 65 
 
 Committee of that Department, whichever 
 is the author of them, amount to this : 
 
 1 . The Board, or the Department, or the 
 Committee, is not sure that the conditions 
 under which the treated and untreated crops 
 were growing were identical. 
 
 2. The Board is not sure that the differ- 
 ences between the crops may not have been 
 due to some other cause than the electrifica- 
 tion of the seed. 
 
 3. Though this important advantage 
 followed in six cases out of seven when 
 electrified and unelectrified seeds were sown 
 side by side on large acreages under ordinary 
 farming conditions, yet some experiments in 
 pots showed no important advantage. 
 
 Let us take these comments seriatim. 
 
 I. The electrified and unelectrified seeds 
 grew side by side in the same field on ad- 
 joining patches or plots of ground ; but 
 the Board is not sure that the conditions 
 under which the two crops were grown 
 were identical. Reference to p. jj et seq. will 
 show what the Board probably had in mind 
 
 5 
 
66 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 in making this comment, and it must be 
 admitted at once that the conditions were 
 not identical. If we are to be scientifically 
 accurate, conditions that are identical in 
 the strict sense of the word can never be 
 secured. Even in laboratory experiments, 
 when the experimenter has everything under 
 strict control, and can use not only seed from 
 the same bulk, as was used in these field 
 experiments, but also soil from the same 
 compost heap, and pots from the same cast, 
 and can stand them side by side, and treat 
 them to the best of his knowledge and skill 
 in precisely the same manner, measuring and 
 weighing every drop of water and every 
 grain of manure that is supplied to them — 
 even in these conditions the treatment of 
 the two plants is not identical. The con- 
 ditions may, by additional precautions, be 
 made more and more closely alike ; but 
 they can never be identical, and to complain 
 that they are not identical is not to the 
 point. They must be different : that is 
 unavoidable ; but the point is, were they 
 
RESULTS 67 
 
 sufficiently different to account for the differences 
 in the crops ? This is all that matters, and, 
 as to this, the officer of the Board who 
 made the experiments must be presumed 
 to know his business. He was sent to make 
 the fairest possible comparison, and there is 
 no reason to suppose that he was lacking 
 in skill or in honesty. Both he and the 
 farmers upon whose land the crops were 
 growing were convinced that there was no 
 such difference in the soil or aspect or other 
 conditions of the plots compared as would 
 account for the difference in the crops. 
 The cause of this difference must therefore 
 have been in the difference of the seed. 
 
 2. Supposing and granting, however, that 
 the difference in the crops is due to differ- 
 ence in the seed, the Board is not sure that 
 the difference in the seed is due to its 
 electrification. It may have been due to 
 the soaking. It may have been due to the 
 soaking combined with the drying. Or it 
 may have been due to the soaking in a 
 chemical solution. 
 
68 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 These surmises have a certain plausibility, 
 and are in accordance with our knowledge of 
 the subject. It is known to every gardener 
 that seed will germinate more rapidly if it 
 is soaked for a few hours before it is sown. 
 The germination is usually accelerated by 
 several days. It is known to every ex- 
 perienced and advanced agriculturist that 
 soaking and then drying the seed equalises 
 and improves the germination, though not 
 the germinating energy. These things have 
 been known since the time of the Pharaohs, 
 and, though it cannot be positively asserted, 
 it is probable that our first parents, when 
 they were cultivating the Garden of Eden, 
 soaked their seed in the waters of the Tigris 
 or the Euphrates. Soaking the seed in 
 order to accelerate germination is one of 
 the routine operations of gardening ; but 
 if the Board of Agriculture wishes to test 
 the value of the practice, no harm will 
 be done by its experiments on the subject. 
 It is always desirable to test the truth of 
 traditional beliefs, and the Board might add 
 
RESULTS 69 
 
 to these experiments others designed to 
 ascertain whether a stone thrown into the 
 air really does, as is generally believed, fall 
 to the ground. 
 
 The effect on the crop of soaking and 
 drying the seed was tested some forty 
 years ago with German laboriousness by 
 two German experimenters, and the Board 
 of Agriculture has unearthed these forgotten 
 experiments and republished them in its 
 Journal for February 1919. The experi- 
 ments, it is to be remarked, were made on 
 no cereal but rye. Considerable increase 
 in the crop was noted in some cases ; but 
 the gist and moral of the experiments — a 
 moral which the Board of Agriculture fails 
 to point — is that, although these experiments 
 were made forty years ago, and although 
 they were made in Germany, from whence 
 all scientific and reliable knowledge has 
 been supposed for so many years to emanate, 
 the practice they inculcate has never been 
 adopted, even in Germany. If there had 
 been any value in it, sufficient to compensate 
 
70 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 for the trouble required, we may be sure that 
 it would have become general long ago. 
 
 The Board of Agriculture is now, it 
 appears, conducting experiments to discover 
 whether the increase in the crop, which the 
 Board does not deny, may not be due to the 
 soaking in the chemical solution, and not 
 to the accompanying electrification. If the 
 Board had communicated with Mr Fry, he 
 could have enlightened it, and saved it the 
 trouble of experimenting. The possibility 
 of the effect being due to the soaking in the 
 chemical and not to the electrification is 
 obvious, so obvious that the Board of Agri- 
 culture noticed it at once, and it is needless 
 to say that it was present to the mind of 
 the inventor of the Wolfryn process from 
 the very outset of his experiments. He has 
 found — and the information is very much at 
 the service of the Board of Agriculture — 
 that soaking in a chemical solution and sub- 
 sequent drying of the seed does produce some 
 increase in the resulting crop ; and the in- 
 crease is sometimes so considerable that it 
 
RESULTS 71 
 
 seemed worth while to take out a patent for 
 the operation. Mr Fry accordingly applied 
 for and obtained a patent, and the belated 
 experiments of the Board of Agriculture 
 will be an infringement of this patent — an 
 infringement that Mr Fry is not likely, 
 however, to resent ; and for this reason : 
 that, though in many cases an improvement 
 in the crop does undoubtedly follow on the 
 practice, yet this improvement is usually far 
 less than is obtained by the additional use 
 of electricity ; and when once the seed is 
 soaked in the chemical solution, and must 
 thereafter be dried, by far the greater part 
 of the trouble and expense is already in- 
 curred, and the additional cost of electrifying 
 is so small, and the additional gain so great, 
 that, having gone thus far, it would be silly 
 not to complete the process. 
 
 The only other matter that calls for 
 comment in the Board of Agriculture's 
 Memorandum is that referring to potatoes. 
 The electrified potatoes showed a decreased 
 yield in four cases out of the five selected. 
 
72 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 In fairness to the inventor and to his process, 
 it should have been added that he has never 
 advised its adoption for potatoes except ex- 
 perimentally. It is obvious that potatoes are 
 very different from wheat, oats, and barley, 
 and that the former require treatment very 
 different from the latter. The treatment of 
 potatoes is still in the experimental stage ; 
 the plots selected by the Board's expert 
 were experimental ; and a certain propor- 
 tion of experiments are, as will be presently 
 explained, bound to fail, and intended to fail. 
 Great success has followed the electrification 
 of seed potatoes in some instances ; consider- 
 able loss has followed in others. This is the 
 history of all such experiments, and will be 
 the history of all subsequent experiments. 
 It is by the method of trial and error that 
 success is at last attained ; and during the 
 experimental stage, in which potatoes still 
 are, failure is as much to be expected as 
 success. To take one feature only : it is 
 manifest that potatoes contain a very much 
 larger proportion of water than corn, and 
 
RESULTS 73 
 
 if potatoes are dried to the same degree as 
 corn is dried, that is, until all the water 
 but about I 2 per cent, of the weight of the 
 substance is extracted, the potatoes will be 
 seriously damaged, and may even be killed. 
 This is, of course, always taken into con- 
 sideration by the inventor himself, but it has 
 not always been remembered by those who 
 have electrified comparatively large quanti- 
 ties ; and the seed potatoes, and consequently 
 the crops, have suffered in consequence. It 
 would be manifestly unfair and misleading to 
 put such failures down to the discredit of 
 the Wolfryn process. This process is not 
 yet recommended, and has not been recom- 
 mended, for potatoes except experimentally. 
 Some of the experiments have been very 
 successful, and there is no reason to doubt 
 that, when the conditions of treatment have 
 been accurately determined, potato crops will 
 be as much benefited as crops of grain. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 FAILURES 
 
 DuRiNci the early stages of experimentation 
 on any given kind of seed, and, indeed, 
 during the early stages of experimentation 
 on almost anything, failures are inevitable, 
 and are normal. The purpose in view is 
 to discover -the best method, and the best 
 method cannot be selected if all are alike. 
 What are to be discovered are the limits 
 within which the best treatment lies ; and 
 these limits can only be discovered by going 
 beyond them, and so courting failure. For 
 instance, it is desired to find the best dura- 
 tion of treatment for a kind of seed that has 
 not been tried before. A large number of 
 parcels of the seed are taken, and are treated 
 for different lengths of time, beginning with 
 
 74 
 
FAILURES 75 
 
 a period that is pretty sure to be too short, 
 and ending with one that is pretty sure to 
 be too long. Each lot of seed is then sown, 
 and, if the guess as to the proper duration 
 has been about right, those seeds that have 
 had the shortest treatment will show no 
 advantage, and with them the process may 
 be said to have failed ; and those seeds that 
 have had the longest treatment will have 
 been injured, and perhaps will not germinate 
 at all, and with them also the process may 
 be said, in a certain sense, to have failed. 
 In one sense, then, the experiments with 
 the first and last lots will be failures ; but 
 manifestly this is a wrong term to apply to 
 them. The purpose of the experiment is 
 not to produce an increase in the crop 
 yielded by every lot, but to find out which 
 lot yields the greatest increase. In this 
 purpose the experiment will be so far suc- 
 cessful that it will justify further trials in 
 which the extremes are omitted, and the 
 new lots begun with a longer treatment 
 than the shortest of the previous trial, and 
 
76 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 ended with a shorter treatment than the 
 longest of that trial ; and so by repeated 
 trials the duration is narrowed down until 
 it can be fixed within half an hour or 
 so. Then the degree of concentration or 
 strength of the solution is tested in a similar 
 way ; and again, in this series of tests, 
 some of the lots will exhibit no effect, and 
 others will be damaged or killed ; but it 
 would be a misnomer to call either of 
 them failures. 
 
 When once the standard treatment for 
 any kind of seed is determined, no failure 
 is met with in laboratory experiments, 
 provided the subsequent experiments are 
 properly conducted ; but failures may still 
 be met with in field experiments, or in 
 the practical experience of farmers, even if 
 the process is properly carried out. Such 
 failures, in which no increase, or perhaps 
 an actual diminution, of the yield of the 
 treated seed is discovered on threshing the 
 crop, are rare, but they do occur now and 
 then, and they must be expected and allowed 
 
FAILURES 77 
 
 for. The causes are various, and are some- 
 times assignable and sometimes not. 
 
 It must be remembered that the raising 
 of agricultural crops is an extremely complex 
 operation, subject to conditions that are 
 imperfectly understood, and that, when elec- 
 tricity is not used, crops sometimes fail for 
 reasons quite apart from any defect in the 
 quality of the seed. The depredations of 
 rabbits, hares, birds, insects, and fungous 
 diseases are by no means uniformly spread 
 over a large field. The damage inflicted by 
 rabbits w^ill be greatest on the side nearest 
 to their warren. The damage inflicted by 
 pheasants will be greater on the side nearest 
 to the wood in which they roost. The 
 competition of weeds will be in the parts of 
 the field nearest to the hedgerows, and some 
 forms of fungous disease spread from the 
 hedgerows in which the fungi pass one 
 phase of their existence. Again, some 
 weeds, such as couch, occur in patches, and 
 these patches may be larger, or more numer- 
 ous, or both, in one part of a field than in 
 
78 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 another. In some fields the soil is patchy, 
 gravel coming to the surface in places and 
 being absent elsewhere ; or the subsoil may 
 be different or may come nearer to the 
 surface in one place than in another, so that 
 here there may be a couple of feet of good 
 loam, and there only six inches. Again, 
 if a field is on a slope, the surface rain-water 
 will flow from the higher to the lower level ; 
 and if the subsoil slopes and is impervious, 
 the rain that has soaked into the soil will 
 have a similar trend. Even if the subsoil 
 is not impervious, water that soaks into the 
 soil will spread horizontally, and, if the field 
 is on a slope, will come to the surface and 
 flow down. But rain-water in the soil 
 dissolves the manurial substances in the soil, 
 and carries them with it ; and when the rain 
 evaporates and the soil dries, the manurial 
 substances are left where the rain has carried 
 them to. For this reason, the lower portion 
 of a sloping field is richer in manure than 
 the upper portion, and, other things being 
 equal, will yield a better crop. So, too, 
 
FAILURES 79 
 
 the lower portion of a field is less exposed 
 to certain winds than the upper portion, 
 and these have their influence on the quan- 
 tity of the crop produced. The trees in 
 the hedgerows rob the adjacent parts of the 
 field of a portion of their nourishment, 
 shade them from the sun, and protect them 
 from certain winds. Sheep may have been 
 folded upon one part of the field and not 
 upon another, so producing a great difference 
 in fertility ; and even where they are folded 
 they manure the ground irregularly. From 
 all these considerations it will be seen that 
 the crop in one part of a field is by no 
 means necessarily grown under the same 
 conditions as the crop in another part of the 
 same field ; but, on the contrary, and especi- 
 ally if the field is large, or sloping, or both, 
 part of the crop is almost necessarily grown 
 under more favourable conditions than other 
 parts, and uniformity in the conditions of 
 growth must be rather the exception than 
 the rule. The differences between one part 
 of a field and another may not be great, but, 
 
8o ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 as the crop is subjected to these conditions 
 week after week and month after month, they 
 must have their effect, and must to some 
 extent vitiate the comparison between crops 
 grown in different parts of the same field. 
 
 So potent are these influences that they 
 must be allowed for, and are allowed for, 
 in estimating the value of any application 
 of treatment to the crop. Of all artificial 
 or chemical manures, none has more thor- 
 oughly established its value and reputation 
 among farmers than sulphate of ammonia. 
 It is used in immense quantities all over the 
 country, and no agriculturist ever dreams 
 of questioning its value. But sulphate of 
 ammonia is by no means uniformly success- 
 ful in increasing the crop. It usually pro- 
 duces a very decided increase, but it does 
 not always produce the same amount of 
 increase, and sometimes it produces no in- 
 crease at all. Sometimes the crop manured 
 with sulphate of ammonia is a failure. But 
 as it is successful in increasing the crop 
 in about 80 per cent, of the cases in which 
 
FAILURES 8 1 
 
 it is used, it is recognised, in spite of its 
 failure in the remaining 20 per cent., as 
 one of the most valuable manures that is 
 used on the farm. When we speak of the 
 electro-chemical ti-eatment of seed as being 
 a valuable adjunct to agriculture, and as a 
 pow^erful means of increasing the crops, we 
 must therefore not be understood to assert 
 that it will be successful in every case, or that 
 the increase that it usually produces will be 
 of the same amount in every case. If we can 
 show that it is followed by a decided increase 
 in the yield in 80 per cent, of the cases in 
 which it is tried, we have proved our point. 
 Up to the present, it has produced a decided 
 increase in much more than 80 per cent, of 
 the cases in which it has been tried. 
 
 In the circumstances above described, 
 there may be an apparent failure, but there 
 will not be a real failure. There is no real 
 failure unless the treated seed, when sown 
 and grown in similar soil and under the 
 same conditions as the untreated, fails to 
 show a substantial increase in yield. We 
 
82 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 now consider the cases in which there is a 
 real failure, and the causes of it. 
 
 In the early stages of applying a new and 
 ill-understood process, failures are inevitable. 
 Even when a process is well known and 
 fully established by the successful practice 
 of years, there are occasional failures. As 
 we all know, even the electric light some- 
 times goes out suddenly : even the telephone 
 sometimes fails to carry its messages : even 
 a locomotive engine sometimes breaks an 
 axle or a connecting-rod : even an explosive 
 shell may be a dud. Perfection is seldom 
 maintained continuously in human affairs, 
 and even the electro-chemical treatment of 
 seeds sometimes fails to produce an increase 
 in the resulting crop as compared with the 
 control. To condemn the process on this 
 account would be unreasonable. It would 
 be as unreasonable as to refuse to travel by 
 railway because there is sometimes an acci- 
 dent on the line. To refrain from using 
 the process because the increase in the crop 
 is not always up to the usual mark is as un- 
 
FAILURES 83 
 
 reasonable as to refuse to travel by railway 
 because trains are not always up to time. 
 " Depend upon it," says Dr Johnson, " a 
 fallible being will fail somewhere " ; and de- 
 pend upon it, a process executed by fallible 
 beings will fail sometimes. 
 
 The reasons for some of these failures 
 have already been given. They lie in the 
 unevenness and irregularity of the soil and 
 other conditions in which the seed is sown. 
 The reasons for other failures, or partial 
 failures, lie in the faulty performance of the 
 process. If the process is wrongly per- 
 formed, its failure lies at the door of the 
 performer, not at that of the process. We 
 might as well blame the engine for not 
 going when the fire is not lit or the steam 
 is not turned on, or the clock for stopping 
 when it is not wound. In the early experi- 
 ments, mistakes were made by the inventor 
 himself. That was inevitable. He had to 
 find out by the expensive process of trial 
 and error the conditions of success. These 
 conditions are now ascertained for cereals. 
 
84 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 and now there should be no failures ; but the 
 mischief is that amateurs will attempt to 
 conduct a process with which they are im- 
 perfectly acquainted, in which they omit 
 some necessary precaution, and then, when 
 failure results, they blame, not themselves, 
 but the process. 
 
 In the early days of the experiments, the 
 inventor freely distributed treated seed to 
 various people for trial. As he had not 
 then ascertained all the necessary precautions, 
 some of these lots were faulty, and resulted 
 in failure. The experimenters thereupon 
 condemned the seed, and the process, and 
 the inventor, and would have no more to 
 do with any of them. The attitude was 
 perhaps not unnatural, and it may have been 
 incautious on the part of the inventor to 
 distribute the seed before he was sure of 
 success ; but, if incautious in this respect, he 
 is cautious as an experimenter, and wished 
 to eliminate the personal factor. However 
 careful he may be, an inventor can scarcely 
 be sure that he does not unintentionally and 
 
FAILURES 85 
 
 unconsciously favour his own invention, and 
 Mr Fry desired to eliminate every possible 
 source of uncertainty. He therefore sent 
 samples of treated and untreated seed to 
 certain agricultural colleges, with the re- 
 quest that they might be grown experi- 
 mentally. This was in the early days " of 
 the process, when the proper conditions 
 were only guessed at, and when failures 
 were frequent ; and the particular experi- 
 ments in question were failures. They 
 either showed an actual loss, or no gain, or 
 a gain so small as to be within the normal 
 margin of error. In the light of subsequent 
 experience it is now known that, with seed 
 treated as these samples were treated, no 
 benefit could be expected ; but the colleges 
 to which the seeds were sent did not take the 
 view that the tests they were asked to make 
 were experimental. They regarded them as 
 decisive of the value of the process ; and as 
 the results showed no benefit, they con- 
 demned the process wholly and utterly, and 
 regard this condemnation as final. 
 
86 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 Of course it is to be remembered that 
 the inventor of the Wolfryn process is not 
 a professor. He is not even an agricul- 
 turist. He is an outsider, and professional 
 men do not welcome the intrusion of an 
 outsider into their domain, which they are 
 apt to guard with a jealous exclusiveness. 
 Doctors are not enthusiastic admirers of 
 the successes of the bone-setter ; military 
 men have not much respect for the amateur 
 strategist ; the clergy are impatient of the 
 theologian who has not gone through the 
 orthodox theological training ; and pro- 
 fessors of agriculture are not wholly exempt 
 from the common failings of humanity. 
 
 It is quite true that this attitude of the 
 professional man to the amateur is in most 
 cases justified. A little knowledge, if it is 
 expressed with airs of importance, is very 
 apt to expose its possessor to ridicule ; but 
 it is not always safe to despise the outsider. 
 Many of the most important inventions, 
 which have completely revolutionised various 
 departments of industry, have been made by 
 
FAILURES 87 
 
 outsiders, men trained and brought up in 
 occupations with which their inventions had 
 nothing at all to do. It is well known that 
 Arkwright, a barber, invented the spinning 
 jenny ; that Newcomen, an ironmonger, and 
 Watt, a mathematical instrument maker, 
 between them invented the steam engine ; 
 and that Trevithick, a miner, and George 
 Stephenson, another miner, between them 
 invented the steam locomotive ; that DoUond, 
 a weaver, and Hall, a barrister, both invented 
 achromatic lenses ; that Lassels, a brewer, 
 discovered the satellites of Uranus, which 
 had itself been discovered by W. Herschel, 
 a music -master ; that Graham, who dis- 
 covered the diurnal variation of the compass, 
 was a clock-maker ; and that the gravity 
 escapement in clocks was invented by 
 Becket-Denison, who was a barrister ; that 
 the electric telegraph was perfected by 
 Wheatstone, a maker of musical instru- 
 ments ; — and the list might be extended 
 indefinitely. There is therefore no primd 
 facie improbability in the invention by Mr 
 
88 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 Fry, who is not an agriculturist, of an 
 important improvement in agriculture. It 
 may be that the professors of agriculture 
 are not very pleased that an outsider should 
 have discovered an important aid that they 
 have overlooked to agriculture, and they 
 have not hitherto shown themselves sympa- 
 thetic towards the process ; but the field of 
 experimentation that it opens up is so vast 
 that there is plenty of room for an army of 
 experimenters. 
 
 But even now that the process is, if not 
 perfected, yet practically quite ascertained 
 and successful, failures do occasionally occur; 
 and when they occur, it is invariably found 
 upon investigation that the fault has been, 
 not in the process itself, but in lapses from 
 it. The most important of these are the 
 following : — 
 
 I. The solution employed may not be 
 ideally suitable to the soil in which the seed 
 is grown. There is much need of further 
 research in this respect. Seed that has been 
 treated electro-chemically may show an im- 
 
FAILURES 89 
 
 portant gain over untreated seed when the 
 two are sown in one soil, and yet, when 
 other seed of the same batch is sown in 
 another soil, there may be no material 
 difference. It is evident that the determin- 
 ing factor must be the suitability of the salt 
 used in the solution to the soil in which the 
 seed is grown. 
 
 2. The duration of the process may not 
 be suitable to the kind of seed under treat- 
 ment. A period of treatment that is right 
 for one kind of seed may be enough to 
 electrocute another kind, and injure or 
 destroy its germinating energy. A dura- 
 tion of treatment that may be right for one 
 kind of seed may not be long enough to 
 produce any appreciable effect upon another. 
 The duration of the treatment must be 
 adjusted to the peculiarity of the seed, and 
 the proper length of treatment can be dis- 
 covered only by a careful course of experi- 
 mentation. Inattention to this matter may 
 result in utter failure. 
 
 3. But the chief cause of failure, the 
 
90 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 cause of 90 per cent, of the bad failures, 
 is in the drying. After electrification the 
 seed must be dried ; and it must be dried to 
 just the right extent and at just the right 
 temperature. If the seed is insufficiently 
 dried, it will be apt to heat if it is kept in 
 bulk, or even in the sack, and then may 
 begin to germinate before it is sown ; or, 
 if it heats sufficiently, its germinating power 
 may be destroyed. Even if it does not heat, 
 it may be mildewed. If it is not kept, but 
 is sown at once, it may be too much swollen 
 with moisture to pass through the drill. If, 
 on the other hand, it is over-dried, the seed 
 is weakened in its germinating energy, or 
 may even be killed. Again, if it is dried 
 at too high a temperature, it may be baked 
 or even scorched, and in either case it is 
 killed. The drying is a very important part 
 of the process, and, when the process fails 
 to give an increase in the crop, the fault 
 is usually in the drying. 
 
 Another source of failure is in delaying 
 the sowing of the seed. The effi^ct of the 
 
FAILURES 91 
 
 electro-chemical process on the seed is 
 transient. After a time it passes away, so 
 that, if the seed is kept too long out of the 
 ground, it reverts to its previous condition, 
 and no effect from the electrification can be 
 expected. If the seed is kept in a dry place, 
 the effect lasts about a month ; but toward 
 the end of a month the effect passes off, and 
 seed sown after this time must not be ex- 
 pected to show much improvement in the 
 crop. It has happened during the war, 
 when electrifying stations were few, that 
 seed had to be sent a considerable distance 
 for treatment, and a month was consumed 
 by the return journey. In this case the 
 increase in the yield, which, if the seed had 
 been sown promptly, might have been 
 expected to be 25 or 30 per cent., was only 
 5 per cent. Here again the process itself 
 could not be justly blamed. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 DISADVANTAGES 
 
 Besides occasional failures, the causes of 
 which can almost always be traced, and found 
 to be either in the faulty performance of 
 the process, or in delay in the sowing, or 
 in inequality of the conditions under which 
 the treated seed and the control seed is sown 
 and cultivated, there are certain disadvan- 
 tages at present in the process, some of 
 which are inherent, while others will be 
 removed as it becomes better understood. 
 Fortunately, none of them is sufficiently 
 important to detract seriously from the 
 benefits that the process confers. They are 
 as follows : — 
 
 In the first place, another operation is 
 
 added to those necessary for the cultivation 
 
 92 
 
DISADVANTAGES 93 
 
 of the farm. On the other hand, the burden 
 of this process does not fall upon the farmer. 
 He does not need to learn how to conduct 
 it. It is done for him. It requires from 
 him no extra skill, no extra labour, no 
 new operation, no additional machine or 
 implement, no more house-room, no addi- 
 tion to his expenses beyond the fee for 
 treating his seed, which is in most cases 
 trifling in comparison with the advantage 
 he gains. 
 
 Secondly, it involves the delay of a day 
 or two in sowing, and this may have some 
 importance in view of the vicissitudes of 
 the weather. If the farmer does not send 
 his seed for treatment until the sowing 
 season is actually upon him, he may miss 
 the best days for sowing, and be compelled 
 to sow when the land is not in as good con- 
 dition as in might have been. The remedy 
 is manifest. He should send his seed in 
 good time. Electrifying stations are now 
 sufficiently numerous to ensure that the 
 farmer will not have to send his seed to any 
 
94 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 great distance, and sufficiently well equipped 
 to ensure that his seed will be treated and 
 returned promptly.^ In time, travelling 
 plants will be installed, which will go 
 round from farm to farm and treat the 
 seed upon the spot, in the farmer's own 
 stackyard ; and by this means time will be 
 saved and trouble abolished. In any case, 
 the farmer has a margin of time of about 
 a month before he need sow his treated 
 seed ; and although the sooner it is sown 
 after treatment the better, yet if he has 
 his seed treated early in the season, so as 
 to have it ready before the time for sowing 
 actually arrives, he will not miss a favour- 
 able opportunity. 
 
 Thirdly, the results are not uniform ; 
 but it is necessary to explain what this 
 means. The results are uniform in this 
 
 1 Experience since this was written shows that it is 
 stated too absolutely. The rush of orders for the spring 
 sowing of 1919 has been so great that the plant installed 
 has proved insufficient, and orders for the electrification 
 of hundreds of sacks have had to be refused. Electrifying 
 plants are rapidly being enlarged and multiplied. 
 
DISADVANTAGES 95 
 
 respect, that all the seed electrified at one 
 operation and sown in similar soil will give 
 uniform results ; but if part of the seed is 
 sown in one kind of soil and part in another, 
 the two crops are likely to differ. One 
 will show more advantage than the other. 
 Again, the increase in the crop on one farm 
 is most in the grain, and in another is most 
 in the straw. The increase in one crop may 
 be eighteen or twenty bushels to the acre, 
 and in another may be only five or six. In 
 these respects the results are not uniform, 
 and the reasons for these discrepancies are 
 yet to be discovered, and no doubt will be 
 discovered when there has been time for the 
 necessary investigations ; and then the want 
 of uniformity can be remedied. But the 
 result is uniform in this respect : that there 
 always is an increase in the crop that grows 
 from the electrified seed. The increase may 
 be in the number of grains in the ear, or in 
 the number of culms grown from each seed, 
 or in the length and stoutness and weight 
 of the straw ; but in one or other or all of 
 
96 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 these respects the crop is increased. In that 
 respect the results are uniform. 
 
 In the fourth place, as already explained, 
 the effect upon the seed is not permanent. 
 In the course of time it passes away, so that 
 the seed will not show any benefit if it is 
 kept too long after it has been treated and 
 before it is sown. It is no use having 
 seed treated in the autumn for sowing in the 
 following spring. It must be sown within 
 a month from the time of treatment. But a 
 month is a sufficient margin, and few farmers 
 will want more in ordinary seasons. 
 
 Lastly, if the process is not properly 
 carried out, it will very probably fail to 
 show any increase in the resulting crop ; 
 and if the treatment is very faulty, the 
 grain may be damaged, and the crop will 
 then suffisr in consequence. This cannot 
 justly be considered a disadvantage of the 
 process itself. The process is a simple one, 
 and is no more difficult to carry out success- 
 fully than the process of dyeing a parcel 
 of yarn, or sterilising a surgical dressing, 
 
DISADVANTAGES 97 
 
 and is much simpler than making a Stilton 
 cheese ; but, like all these processes, it is 
 not foolproof. It may be bungled, and it 
 is very likely to be bungled if it is conducted 
 by inexperienced or careless hands. It is 
 simple, but it requires vigilant attention, 
 proper conditions, and a certain skill that 
 is to be attained only by practice under a 
 skilled instructor. If these conditions are 
 not observed, the grain may be damaged, 
 and the process may fall into undeserved 
 discredit. In fact, it has fallen into un- 
 deserved discredit in certain quarters, in 
 consequence of faulty performance due to 
 want of experience and want of skill in the 
 performers ; but it cannot be too strongly 
 insisted upon that in every case in which 
 the result has been unsatisfactory the failure 
 has been traced either to a fault in the 
 method of performing the process, or to 
 undue delay in sowing the seed, or to differ- 
 ence in the conditions under which the 
 treated and the control crops were grown. 
 To this rule there has been no exception 
 
 7 
 
98 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 whatever. Mistakes have been made. In 
 an entirely new process it is inevitable that 
 mistakes should be made ; and in certain 
 quarters the reputation' of the process has 
 suffered because early and experimental 
 trials, all of which could not be expected 
 to be successful, were taken for examples 
 of a matured and perfected process that 
 ought never to fail. The process is now 
 matured with respect to cereals, and with 
 them it does not fail ; but before it was 
 matured there were failures which were 
 then unaccountable, but have since been 
 explained. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 HORTICULTURAL SEEDS 
 
 The inventor of the Wolfryn electro-chemical 
 process took for the subject of his early ex- 
 periments the chief seeds used in agriculture. 
 The choice was natural, and was wise. 
 Agricultural crops are by far the most im- 
 portant crops, and the most abundant crops ; 
 and of agricultural crops, the three standard 
 cereals, wheat, oats, and barley, are by far 
 the most important. As the experiments 
 proceeded, the world was threatened with a 
 scarcity of food ; and if these crops could be 
 materially increased, much would be done 
 to relieve this scarcity. Moreover, the three 
 cereals are much alike ; they all belong to 
 the same natural order of plants, they are 
 easily procured in abundance, and they are 
 
 99 
 
loo ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 grown upon a large scale almost everywhere 
 in these islands. For all these reasons, 
 cereals were chosen for the first subjects 
 of experiment. 
 
 The last consideration, the scale on which 
 they are grown, is especially important. An 
 acre is a small area in the eyes of an agri- 
 culturist, and a single experiment, in which 
 the yield of one acre is compared with the 
 yield of another, is to the practical farmer 
 of only trifling magnitude, and carries but 
 little weight ; but in an acre of wheat there 
 are between a million and a half and two 
 millions of wheat plants ; and what an ex- 
 periment conducted upon an acre of ground 
 gives, when compared with the yield of 
 another acre, is the average yield of at least 
 a million and a half of plants compared with 
 the average yield of another miUion and a 
 half. Experiments upon this scale cannot 
 be conducted in the laboratory ; experiments 
 on this scale are rare in the practice of ex- 
 perimentation ; and experiments in which 
 the average of such enormous numbers is 
 
HORTICULTURAL SEEDS loi 
 
 taken must carry weight. Such numbers 
 completely eliminate the disturbing effects 
 of individual peculiarities in the seeds. 
 
 For all these good and sufficient reasons, 
 agricultural seeds, and especially the seeds of 
 cereals, received first attention, and horti- 
 cultural seeds were relegated to the second 
 place, and left over for subsequent ex- 
 perimentation ; but now that the proper 
 treatment of cereals has been sufficiently 
 ascertained to assure an increase in the 
 crop in every case in which the process 
 is properly conducted and the comparison 
 fairly made, the inventor is turning his 
 attention to horticultural seeds. 
 
 The field of experimentation opening out 
 in this direction is enormous and inex- 
 haustible. Horticultural seeds are twenty 
 times, perhaps fifty times, as numerous as 
 agricultural seeds, and are also very much 
 more diverse. They belong to a much 
 greater number of natural orders, and to 
 orders that are much more widely different, 
 and must engage the attention of many 
 
I02 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 experimenters for many years. A beginning 
 has been made, however, and some excellent 
 results have been obtained ; but it must be 
 clearly understood that the electro-chemical 
 treatment of horticultural seeds is still in the 
 experimental stage, and will not be recom- 
 mended for general adoption for any one kind 
 of seed until practical certainty of success 
 with that kind of seed has been attained. 
 
 Meantime, the claims of agricultural seeds 
 are still urgent and still clamant. From all 
 parts of the world — from places as far distant 
 as New Mexico, North Borneo, Nyasaland, 
 South Africa, Trinidad, New Zealand, India, 
 Japan, and elsewhere — the inventor receives 
 urgent requests to explain the proper treat- 
 ment for rice, sorghum, flax, sugar-cane, 
 cotton, tobacco, and many other crops ; and 
 while horticultural seeds must be attended 
 to, the claims of agricultural crops must 
 take precedence. Manifestly, to settle the 
 proper treatment of all these seeds, and at 
 the same time to carry out the business 
 organisation of the process in this and other 
 
HORTICULTURAL SEEDS 103 
 
 countries, and to attend to the ever-increas- 
 ing mass of inquiries and correspondence on 
 the subject, is beyond the power of any one 
 man, especially of a man approaching his 
 eightieth year. This being so, and since 
 the existing agricultural colleges display no 
 inclination to take the matter in hand, their 
 time being fully occupied, no doubt, with 
 other affairs, it is Mr Fry's intention to 
 establish, as soon as circumstances permit, 
 a thoroughly equipped laboratory, on a 
 sufficient area of ground, with a staff of 
 skilled and trained experimenters to carry 
 out investigations under his own eye, and 
 determine the optimum treatment for every 
 kind of seed. 
 
 No doubt, when this can be done, prin- 
 ciples will be established and rules laid down 
 that will materially shorten the time that 
 need be spent over any one kind of seed. 
 Indeed, from the experiments already made, 
 which are very numerous, principles are 
 beginning to emerge, and it is' possible to 
 begin the treatment of a new seed with 
 
I04 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 some approximate guess as to the proper 
 time, the proper strength of solution, and so 
 forth ; and further experience will narrow 
 the limits within which the treatment may 
 be begun. But the problem with respect 
 to horticultural seeds is in its infancy, and, 
 while the inventor will welcome the co- 
 operation of gardeners in growing treated 
 seeds alongside of untreated seeds in the most 
 various conditions, it must be distinctly 
 understood that such trials are at present 
 purely experimental ; that failures are to be 
 looked for and expected ; and that the pro- 
 cess is not to be condemned and abandoned 
 because, with horticultural seeds, failures 
 occasionally occur. If every experiment 
 were successful at first trial, there would be 
 little need of experiment. The only safe 
 road to discovery is the road of trial and 
 error ; and it is out of repeated errors that 
 success at last emerges. 
 
 The conditions under which living things 
 grow and thrive are so immensely complex 
 that a result cannot be guaranteed with per- 
 
HORTICULTURAL SEEDS 105 
 
 feet confidence in every case ; but every 
 farmer, every gardener, and every man of 
 common-sense will admit that if a cer- 
 tain treatment, compared with controls, is 
 followed in 80 per cent, of a large number 
 of trials by a certain result which does not 
 occur in the controls, that result is due to 
 that treatment. In the case of cereals, sub- 
 stantial increase in the crop has followed the 
 electro-chemical treatment in much more 
 than 80 per cent, of the cases in which it 
 has been fairly tried ; and when it is success- 
 ful in 80 per cent, of trials of any horticul- 
 tural seed, then, and not till then, it will be 
 recommended for general adoption for that 
 kind of seed. Premature publication of 
 individual and sporadic successes as evidence 
 of general success is much to be deprecated. 
 It leads to anticipations that may not be 
 fulfilled in other cases, and thus may throw 
 undeserved discredit on a valuable process. 
 When the inventor recommends the adop- 
 tion of the process for any particular kind 
 of seed, it may be relied upon to produce an 
 
io6 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 increase of the crop in at least 80 per cent, 
 of cases in which that seed is sown ; but 
 even in these cases no specific amount or 
 proportion of increase can be guaranteed. 
 All that our present experience warrants 
 us in predicting is that the proportion of 
 increase is likely to range, on the average, 
 about 30 per cent. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE EXPLANATION 
 
 Of the remarkable effect that electrification 
 of seed has in increasing the vigour and 
 yield of the crop that grows from the seed 
 thus treated there can be no doubt, but by 
 what means this effect is brought about is 
 at present a matter of speculation. Several 
 hypotheses present themselves, and some at 
 least of these are susceptible of verification 
 by observation and experiment ; and, as the 
 matter is attracting much attention among 
 students of bio-chemistry and in botanical 
 laboratories, it is probable that before long 
 a good deal of light will be thrown upon it. 
 
 The facts are : — 
 
 I . That by electrification the seed is 
 altered in some way that causes it to grow 
 
 107 
 
io8 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 more vigorously, and to yield a larger 
 growth. 
 
 2. That the effect on cereals is sometimes 
 to produce a greater yield of grain, some- 
 times to produce a greater yield of straw, 
 sometimes to have both of these effects ; 
 very rarely to increase the straw apparently 
 at some expense to the yield of grain ; less 
 rarely to increase the yield of grain at some 
 expense to the growth of straw ; and 
 frequently to increase the yield of both 
 grain and straw, but in different proportions 
 in different cases, although the treatment 
 was, as far as could be judged, the same in 
 all these cases. 
 
 3. That the effect is transitory, so that 
 if the sowing of the seed is delayed for more 
 than a month after the electrification, the 
 effect is diminished, and, if the sowing is 
 much delayed, may be wholly lost. 
 
 4. Some seeds, such as cereals, respond 
 readily to the treatment, and rarely fail to 
 show an increased yield in the subsequent 
 crop. Other seeds, such as Leguminosae, 
 
THE EXPLANATION 109 
 
 appear to be refractory to the treatment, 
 and up to the present time have shown 
 sometimes little and sometimes no increase 
 in the resulting crop. 
 
 5. Even seed of the same kind, oats or 
 barley for instance, shows .very different 
 results in different cases, although the treat- 
 ment is, as far as can be judged, the same. 
 One crop yields a very large increase after 
 electrification, another parcel of similar seed 
 yields a very small increase. 
 
 These are the facts to be explained. 
 What is the explanation ? What hypotheses 
 suggest themselves as capable of explaining 
 all the facts ? For, however satisfactorily 
 an hypothesis may explain some of them, 
 it must be rejected unless it accounts for 
 them all. 
 
 The obvious explanation, which the ex- 
 perienced experimenter will be inclined to 
 regard with suspicion just because it is 
 obvious, is that the electrification adds to 
 the store of energy contained in the seed, 
 which, since it contains more energy, acts 
 
no ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 more energetically. For a seed, like every 
 other living thing, contains, not only a 
 certain quantity of matter, but also a certain 
 quantity of energy animating the matter. 
 This is the difference between a live thing 
 and a dead thing. If a live seed is heated 
 to a certain temperature, it will be killed. 
 It will be to all outward seeming the same 
 as before. It will look the same and weigh 
 the same. It will contain the same quantity 
 of matter, and the matter will consist of 
 very much the same quantities of the same 
 elements in very much the same combina- 
 tions ; but if we sow this seed under even 
 the most favourable conditions, it will not 
 germinate. Instead of germinating, it will 
 decay. That is to say, instead of assimilat- 
 ing new matter and new energy, and building 
 up its material structure into new and more 
 elaborate combinations, it will fall to pieces, 
 and subside into less and less elaborate and 
 complicated structures, which lose their 
 cohesion, separate from one another, and 
 exist merely as chemical combinations and 
 
THE EXPLANATION iii 
 
 no longer as an organised structure. These 
 chemical substances contain energy, it is 
 true, but only enough energy to hold them 
 together in those combinations. They do 
 not contain the additional charge of avail- 
 able energy that is capable of building them 
 up into more elaborate and complicated 
 structures. They are dead, and this is the 
 difference between life and death, between 
 living things and dead things. Dead things 
 contain only enough energy to keep them 
 as they are : hving things contain in addi- 
 tion enough energy to add to the complica- 
 tion of their structure, and to enable them 
 to absorb and assimilate from without both 
 matter and energy for this purpose. 
 
 Now, electricity is, from one aspect, a 
 mode of energy. If it is a mode of motion, 
 it is energy. If it is particulate, its par- 
 ticles are in motion, and so contain or convey 
 energy ; and in either case, if we pass elec- 
 tricity into a substance, we add to the energy 
 in that substance, and this energy is as it 
 were detached, free, and additional to that 
 
112 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 previously contained in the substance. It is, 
 therefore, a plausible and inviting hypothesis 
 to suppose that the energy thus imparted to 
 the seed may reinforce and reinvigorate what 
 we may term, without committing ourselves 
 to any theory, the vital energy of the seed, 
 and so enable it to grow more vigorously 
 and bring forth fruit more abundantly. The 
 hypothesis is simple and attractive, but will 
 it cover all the facts ? Scarcely. It is diffi- 
 cult on this hypothesis to account for the 
 discrepancies of the results in different cases. 
 It is difficult to account for the increased 
 yield being sometimes in the grain and 
 sometimes in the straw. It is difficult to 
 account for the small effect the process has 
 upon Leguminosas. It is difficult to account 
 for the endurance of the effect for a month 
 or more, and for its disappearance after this 
 time is elapsed. Each of these effects may 
 no doubt be explained by straining the 
 hypothesis in this direction and in that, and 
 by adding subsidiary hypotheses ; but the 
 necessity of doing so at once throws doubt 
 
THE EXPLANATION 113 
 
 upon the main hypothesis. It resembles on 
 a small scale the prodigious framework of 
 what is called Mendehsm, in which hypo- 
 thesis is piled on hypothesis, supposition on 
 supposition, and assumption on assumption, 
 until the mind reels under the accumulation. 
 Pelion is piled upon Ossa, and the two are 
 supported upon a slender stalk too fragile to 
 bear the weight, and the whole structure 
 collapses by reason of its top-heaviness. 
 We must look round for something more 
 plausible. 
 
 It is now well known that the whole 
 superficial crust of the earth swarms with 
 bacteria, and that some of these bacteria 
 have very great influence, for evil or for 
 good, upon the lives of higher organisms. 
 The bacilli of tuberculosis and anthrax, and 
 the vibrio of cholera, are cases in point. 
 Plants also have their parasitic bacteria, some 
 of which are destructive or deleterious to 
 the plant on which they are parasitic, and 
 others, such as the well-known azotobacter 
 and B. radicicola, are beneficial. Electricity 
 
114 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 may have, and in fact is known to have, an 
 influence on the growth of bacteria, and it 
 is possible that it may stimulate and assist 
 the growth of the nitrifying bacteria, and 
 perhaps kill or inhibit the growth of those 
 that are inimical to the growth of the plant. 
 This is a plausible speculation, but it is only 
 a speculation, and has little support from 
 what is known ; neither does it fit in with all 
 the facts that are to be explained. Neither 
 azotobacter nor B. radicicola is known to 
 occur in seeds, nor is either of them para- 
 sitic upon cereals ; nor is it known that 
 either of them is stimulated into greater 
 activity by electricity. We are here in the 
 region of pure speculation, unsupported by 
 any groundwork of fact, and it is not worth 
 while to pursue researches in this direction 
 until all else fails. 
 
 Again, it is well known that plants of all 
 kinds are subject to the attacks of fungi, some 
 of which are very deadly in their effects. 
 Cereals, especially, suffer much from fungous 
 diseases. It is necessary to mention only the 
 
THE EXPLANATION 115 
 
 smut, bunt, and rust of wheat, ergot of rye, 
 and mildew, which attacks all cereals and 
 many other plants as well. Smut, bunt, and 
 mildew undoubtedly infest the surface of the 
 seed grain, and may perhaps penetrate the 
 interior ; and consequently it is a recognised 
 and prevalent custom to spray seed corn with 
 a solution of sulphate of copper in order to 
 kill the adherent spores. It is evident that 
 the steeping of the grain in a solution of 
 some metallic salt, which is part of the 
 Wolfryn process, will tend to destroy the 
 spores on the surface of the grain, and that 
 the ions, which are driven into the seed by 
 the electric current, may destroy any spores 
 that may have penetrated into the interior of 
 the seed, and thus protect the plant against 
 funguous attacks ; but this is not what we 
 are in search of. There is no evidence that 
 the superior yield of the plants grown from 
 electrified seed is due to this freedom from 
 fungous attacks to which the unelectrified 
 plants are subject. The advantage is still 
 gained when both crops are free from any 
 
ii6 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 disease. It is true that there is a certain 
 amount of evidence, not yet enough to 
 enunciate formally, that the electrifying 
 process does diminish the liability of plants 
 to be attacked by fungous diseases ; but 
 this would not account for the increase of 
 the crop over that of a crop that is free 
 from disease. We must seek some other 
 explanation. 
 
 The hypothesis that I suggest provision- 
 ally is rather more complicated than any of 
 the foregoing, but it has the merit that it 
 is not inconsistent with any of the known 
 facts, and does account for them all in a 
 fairly satisfactory manner without very much 
 aid from subsidiary and auxiliary hypotheses. 
 It will need a little more space for its state- 
 ment, and it must be admitted at once that 
 it is sadly in need of substantiation ; but it 
 is quite susceptible of being substantiated or 
 disproved by appropriate research, and this 
 is no small merit in an hypothesis. 
 
 Although the power of vitamine was 
 discovered in 1772 by Captain Cook, it is 
 
THE EXPLANATION 117 
 
 fewer than twenty years since the name was 
 attached to the substance, and fewer years 
 still since a vitamine was isolated and made 
 visible separately from other things ; but by 
 this time everybody knows what vitamines 
 are, and has some notion of their properties. 
 They belong to a much larger class of sub- 
 stances, some of which occur in various 
 articles of food, and others are elaborated in 
 the animal body itself, but all have certain 
 properties in common. All of them are 
 necessary for the healthy balance of nutri- 
 tion of the body. If any one is absent, the 
 nutrition of the body fails or goes wrong 
 in a certain definite way, depending on the 
 particular substance that is absent from the 
 blood. If one is absent, the gums swell, 
 become spongy, and bleed, the nutrition of 
 the body fails in certain ways, and the person 
 dies. If another is absent, the body becomes 
 dropsical, the nerves fail to perform their 
 functions, the heart fails, and the person dies. 
 If yet another is absent, the skin atrophies, 
 the hair falls out, the mind decays, the 
 
ri8 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 person becomes demented, and at length 
 dies. If another substance is absent, the 
 proper characters of sex are not assumed, 
 and the person remains for life in the 
 neutral sexual condition of childhood. If 
 a male, he grows no beard, and his voice 
 retains its thin, piping, childish pitch ; if 
 a female, the hips remain narrow and the 
 breasts never develop. Among these sub- 
 stances are some which regulate growth 
 in infancy and childhood. If one of these 
 substances is absent, the growth of different 
 parts of the body is disproportionate. 
 Certain parts of the body — the brain, for 
 instance — remain undeveloped, and never 
 progress beyond an early stage. If another 
 is absent, the whole body is dwarfed, the 
 person never grows up, but remains for life 
 with the body of an infant. Some of these 
 substances are, as I have said, elaborated in 
 the body itself, usually in certain special 
 organs, which have no other function ; others 
 of them are provided by the food, that is, 
 by certain articles of food ; but all have in 
 
THE EXPLANATION 119 
 
 common the property that their powers are 
 exerted by almost incredibly small quantities. 
 A man of 150 lbs. in weight is kept in 
 robust health by two or three grains per 
 diem of one of these substances. If these 
 two or three grains are wanting, he sickens 
 and dies : if they are provided, he is pre- 
 served in vigorous life. A pound contains 
 7000 grains, so that one or two millionth 
 parts of his body-weight of one of these 
 vitamines is enough to sustain a man in 
 robust health : the continued absence of 
 these one or two millionths of his weight 
 is fatal. 
 
 Nor is it only animals that depend for 
 their lives and their growth upon the in- 
 corporation into their bodies of extremely 
 minute quantities of very complex substances. 
 Plants also have their vitamines, which are 
 called, not vitamines, but auximones ; and, as 
 in the case of animals, these accessory food- 
 substances have a profound influence upon 
 the growth of the plant. We may provide 
 an animal with what appears to be a physio- 
 
I20 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 logically perfect diet, containing in ample 
 quantity and in due proportion all the pro- 
 tein, carbohydrate, fat, and salts that are 
 necessary to its life and growth ; but if 
 we do not provide the necessary vitamines, 
 the animal will neither grow nor live. And 
 similarly, we may provide a plant in ample 
 quantity and due proportion with all the 
 necessary potash, phosphates, nitrogen, and 
 salts that are required for its growth and 
 nourishment ; but if it has not its necessary 
 quantity of auximones, it will not thrive, 
 and presumably, if we could deprive it of 
 its auximones, it would not live. 
 
 The extraordinary results that have been 
 attained by Professor Bottomley by the use 
 of bacterised peat appear to be owing, with- 
 out doubt, to the additional supply of auxi- 
 mones that his bacterised peat supplies to 
 the plants ; and by whatever means we could 
 increase the supply of auximones, by those 
 means we could increase the vigour of the 
 plant and the abundance of its products. 
 The seed of every plant contains a store of 
 
THE EXPLANATION 121 
 
 nourishment for the supply of the seedHng 
 until it can gather its nourishment from the 
 soil or the air in which it grows. Some 
 seeds are of microscopic dimensions, and 
 contain but little nourishment ; others, such 
 as the broad bean, and still more the cocoa- 
 nut, are of considerable size, and contain 
 much ; but all contain some. And as the 
 milk of mammals is a perfect physiological 
 food, containing all the ingredients, includ- 
 ing the vitamines, necessary for the nourish- 
 ment, growth, and development of the infant 
 mammal, so the albumen of the seed con- 
 tains all the nourishment, including the 
 auximones, necessary for the nourishment, 
 growth, and development of the seedling 
 plant. 
 
 We have seen that the function of one 
 of the animal vitamines — it is not called 
 a vitamine, for it is produced within the 
 animal body, and therefore receives another 
 name — is to enable the animal to attain the 
 dimension proper to its species and race. If 
 this particular vitamine is deficient, the 
 
122 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 animal, like Peter Pan, never grows up, but 
 remains throughout its life of infantile stature 
 and development. If this particular vita- 
 mine is in excess, the animal grows too 
 much, and develops into a giant. Plants as 
 well as animals have their vitamines, and one 
 of these vitamines regulates the stature of 
 the plant. If it is deficient, the plant never 
 grows up. It remains, if not infantile, yet 
 dwarfed ; and dwarfing is one of the most 
 frequent varieties of very many species and 
 races of plants. On the other hand, if we 
 could supply the plant with an extra quantity 
 of this particular vitamine or auximone, 
 there is no reason to doubt that we could 
 produce in it an earlier and more luxurious 
 development. 
 
 We may pursue this line of speculation a 
 little farther. It is established beyond doubt 
 that there is one substance that conduces to 
 the attainment by animals of mere size, and 
 another that regulates the time and degree 
 of development, especially of sexual develop- 
 ment, so that, when this latter vitamine is 
 
THE EXPLANATION 123 
 
 wanting, sexual differentiation never takes 
 place, and the animal remains permanently 
 in the neutral state of childhood. On the 
 other hand, cases sometimes occur in which 
 this vitamine is produced in excess or pre- 
 maturely, and then the animal undergoes 
 premature sexual development, so that the 
 boy of seven or eight grows a beard and his 
 voice deepens into an unnatural bass, and the 
 girl at even an earlier age attains puberty 
 and becomes a premature woman. That 
 wide variations occur in animals in fruitful- 
 ness and other sexual properties, and that 
 these variations have little correlation with 
 variations in size and in development in 
 other respects, is well known. 
 
 Now, I think it is fair to suppose that an 
 analogous state of things obtains in plants 
 also. Like animals, plants increase at first 
 solely in size and in structural complexity. 
 Like animals, plants, when a certain size 
 and structural complexity are attained, be- 
 come sexually complete and reproduce their 
 kind. Like animals, plants occasionally 
 
124 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 remain dwarfed in stature, occasionally at- 
 tain premature sexual completion, and vary 
 much in fertility and in other sexual char- 
 acters, such as the size, colouring, double- 
 ness, and so forth of their flowers. It is 
 therefore fair to suppose that, as in animals, 
 so in plants, development in size and vigour 
 may be regulated by one vitamine, and de- 
 velopment in sexual characters by another. 
 If we grant this, we have an explanation of 
 the undoubted fact that one apple tree runs 
 chiefly to wood, while another produces fruit 
 several years earlier, and much more abun- 
 dantly. We then see why one crop of corn 
 runs chiefly to straw, while another with less 
 luxuriant growth produces more grain. 
 
 These vitamines, auximones, or whatever 
 we please to call them, are extremely com- 
 plex bodies ; but that they have a more or 
 less definite chemical constitution is shown 
 by the fact that they can be isolated by 
 chemical processes and obtained in crystal- 
 line form. They are also closely allied in 
 chemical constitution ; and the experience 
 
THE EXPLANATION 125 
 
 of chemists is that, in building up in the 
 laboratory complex bodies of very similar 
 chemical constitution, differing only by an 
 atom of this or an atom of that, or having 
 the same number of atoms differently ar- 
 ranged, the processes by which these dif- 
 ferent bodies are formed are closely similar, 
 and sometimes result in a mixture of two or 
 more similar bodies. Moreover, it is a 
 commonplace of laboratory knowledge that 
 electricity has a powerful effect in disturbing 
 and altering chemical combinations. 
 
 Taking all these facts together, I build 
 upon them the following hypothesis. The 
 action of electricity upon a seed is to modify 
 the chemical constitution of certain con- 
 stituents of what is called the albumen of 
 the seed. Among these constituents are 
 the auximones necessary to the growth and 
 development of the plant, and these auxi- 
 mones differ but slightly from one another 
 and from other constituents of the albumen, 
 so that under certain conditions the auxi- 
 mones are constituted out of the albumen. 
 
126 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 The effect of the electricity is, as I take it, 
 so to act upon the albumen as to produce 
 more of the auximones. These, though 
 they differ profoundly in their effect upon 
 the plant, are closely alike in their chemical 
 constitution, so that some very trifling dif- 
 ference in the intensity or duration of the 
 electric current, or perhaps in the strength 
 of the saline solution in which the seed is 
 steeped, may determine whether the increase 
 is in the auximone that determines growth 
 or in that which determines fertility. If 
 the first is increased, the result will be a 
 stronger and taller plant, with greater tiller- 
 ing and more sturdy straw. If the other 
 auximone is increased, the result will be 
 greater fertility, and a more copious pro- 
 duction of seed. 
 
 Now let us apply this hypothesis to the 
 facts and see if they are consistent with it. 
 We have already seen that it is consistent 
 with the facts that the growth of the plant 
 is more vigorous and that it produces more 
 grain when the seed has been electrified, 
 
THE EXPLANATION 127 
 
 and it is consistent with the fact that the 
 increase is sometimes in the tillering and in 
 the length and sturdiness of the straw, and 
 sometimes in the yield of grain ; sometimes 
 in both, and sometimes in one at the expense 
 of the other. All these facts fit in very 
 well with the hypothesis. 
 
 The next fact to be accounted for is that 
 the effect of electrification upon the seed is 
 transitory. This is quite consistent with 
 the other hypotheses, and is consistent with 
 this also ; for these auximones are bodies of 
 extremely complicated chemical constitution 
 — so complicated that their true nature and 
 chemical structure have hot yet been deter- 
 mined. The more complicated the chemical 
 structure of a substance, the more unstable 
 it is, other things being equal, and the more 
 readily its constitution is altered ; the more 
 readily it parts with an atom here and a 
 molecule there, and changes into something 
 else. Now, one of the conditions most 
 favourable to the decomposition of all or- 
 ganic bodies is the presence of moisture, and 
 
128 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 it is therefore significant that, if we wish 
 to preserve the change, whatever it is, that 
 is produced in the seed by electricity, we 
 must keep the seed dry. Damp seed reverts 
 to its pre-electrified condition more rapidly 
 than dry seed. The fact that the effect is 
 transient fits the hypothesis, therefore, 
 very well. 
 
 The fourth fact to be accounted for is 
 that some seeds, such as those of cereals, 
 respond readily to the electrical treatment, 
 and show increases, sometimes very great 
 increases, in the crops they produce, while 
 upon other seeds, such as Leguminosae, little 
 or no effect has yet been produced. In 
 explanation of this, it is certain that the 
 chemical constitution of the "albumen" of 
 cereals is widely different from that of the 
 " albumen " of leguminous seeds. The 
 latter, for instance, contain much more 
 protein, and the protein they contain is very 
 different from the gluten of wheat or the 
 protein of barley or oats. But there is 
 another and more significant difference. Of 
 
THE EXPLANATION 129 
 
 all plants that have been tested, leguminous 
 
 plants contain the largest proportion of 
 
 auximone; This auximone is distributed 
 
 throughout the plant, and is elaborated by 
 
 the plant in the course of its growth. The 
 
 same thing occurs in other plants, but, as 
 
 it would appear, they do not need so much 
 
 as the highly organised leguminous plants, 
 
 and therefore do not produce as much. 
 
 From this it seems to follow that a small 
 
 addition to the native auximone — and the 
 
 amount produced in the seed can be but 
 
 small — would produce less effect upon a 
 
 leguminous plant, which already contains 
 
 much, than upon a plant of a different kind 
 
 that contains but little. Here again the 
 
 hypothesis seems to be consistent with the 
 
 fact of observation. 
 
 Lastly, the effect of the electric treatment, 
 even when carried out in the same way 
 upon the same kind of seed, varies within 
 very wide limits, increasing sometimes the 
 straw, sometimes the grain, and the increase 
 being sometimes as little as 4 or 5 per cent., 
 
 9 
 
I30 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 and sometimes as much as 60 or 70 per 
 cent. As to this, there are two things to be 
 said. In the first place, it has been found 
 in experience that different seeds, even of 
 closely allied family, require very different 
 lengths of treatment to produce the best 
 effects. Barley, for instance, requires twice 
 as long as oats. To people who have no 
 experience of agriculture, wheat is wheat, 
 barley is barley, and oats are oats ; but 
 agriculturists and seed merchants know that 
 there are quite 150 different kinds of wheat 
 in cultivation, all differing from one another 
 in some more or less important respect ; and 
 if wheat and barley take, as they do, such 
 very different lengths of treatment to pro- 
 duce the best effect, it is highly probable 
 that different kinds of wheat require different 
 lengths of treatment — lengths that do not 
 differ as widely as that of barley does from 
 that of wheat, but still lengths that are 
 material. 
 
 Again, it is known to millers that dif- 
 ferent varieties of wheat have very different 
 
THE EXPLANATION 131 
 
 physical constitutions, behave very differently 
 in the mill, and yield their products in 
 different proportions and of different quali- 
 ties. These physical peculiarities are accom- 
 panied, and to some extent conditioned, by 
 chemical peculiarities, and therefore it is 
 not to be expected that the same electrical 
 treatment will produce the same effect upon 
 them all, especially when we consider how 
 slight the differences between many of the 
 different chemical constituents of the seed 
 are. On these grounds, we should expect 
 that the effects of the electrical treatment of 
 seed would be diverse, and especially so if 
 the effect is of the nature of a chemical 
 change. There is nothing inconsistent with 
 the hypothesis, therefore, in the diversity of 
 effect that electricity produces on different 
 samples of seed that are called by the same 
 name. It is quite likely, moreover, that 
 the effect may vary according to the physical 
 condition of the seed at the time of treat- 
 ment, and according to the physical condi- 
 tions under which it has been kept. The 
 
132 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 chemical changes that take place in seeds 
 are subtle and elusive, and very little is 
 known of them ; but it may be presumed 
 with some confidence that one sample of 
 seed will differ in chemical constitution, and 
 therefore in its chemical reactions, from 
 another sample grown in the same field at 
 the same time, if, in the meantime, they 
 have been stored under different conditions 
 of dryness, temperature, and perhaps other 
 respects. Even the temperature of the bath 
 in which the electrification takes place may 
 very likely modify the effect of the elec- 
 tricity upon the chemical constitution of the 
 complex substance that goes under the name 
 of albumen. There is nothing, therefore, 
 in the diversified effect of the electricity 
 upon the seed that is inconsistent with the 
 hypothesis here advanced, and upon the 
 whole it fits the facts fairly well, and better 
 than any other that has yet been suggested. 
 
 Recently, a book that throws a flood of 
 light on electro-physiology has been pub- 
 lished by Mr Baines, an accomplished elec- 
 
THE EXPLANATION 133 
 
 trician. He has proved by many thousands 
 of experiments, conducted with the most 
 sensitive instruments that have yet been 
 invented, that every plant, and every part 
 of a plant, not only has electric capacity, 
 but contains an electric charge. It is, in 
 short, a charged electric cell ; and he has 
 shown that this is as true of the seed as of 
 every other distinct part of the plant. It 
 seems that the proper performance of the 
 function of each part of the plant is con- 
 nected with the possession of this charge of 
 electricity ; and it requires no great effort 
 of reasoning to see that, if this is so, the 
 greater the electric charge, the more vigor- 
 ously will the function be performed. One 
 of Mr Baines' experiments is a very remark- 
 able confirmation of those of Mr Fry. Mr 
 Baines cooked two potatoes. One he boiled 
 for fifteen minutes, and the other he baked 
 for the same length of time. After this 
 treatment, one would naturally suppose that 
 the potatoes were dead, and no gardener in 
 his senses would expect them to show any 
 
134 ELECTRIFICATION OF SEEDS 
 
 sign of life. Nor would they have shown 
 any sign of life if Mr Baines had left them 
 alone ; but instead of leaving them alone he 
 passed into them for twenty-four hours a 
 feeble current of electricity, and thereafter 
 both the potatoes sprouted in a remarkable 
 manner. It was remarkable that they should 
 sprout at all, and that they did so is striking 
 evidence of the efficacy of Mr Fry's system. 
 After this, objections to the electrification 
 of seeds on the ground that a priori it is not 
 likely to improve the vigour of germination 
 are out of court. It is true that a potato 
 is not a seed, but it acts the part of a seed 
 in farming operations ; and Mr Fry has 
 found that the electrification of seeds and of 
 " seed " potatoes may be carried on on the 
 same lines and will produce similar efFects. 
 
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