Excerpt from The Rothamsted Experiments: Being an Account of Some of the Results of the Agricultural Investigations, Conducted at Rothamsted in the Field, the Feeding Shed, and the Laboratory Over a Period of Fifty Years

Eton and Oxford were not of much assistance to those whose tastes were scientific rather than classical, and consequently my early pursuits were of a most desultory character. Matters, however, began to look serious when, at the age of twenty, I gave an order to a London firm to fit up a complete laboratory, and I am afraid it sadly disturbed the ace of mind of my mother to see one of the best bedrooms in the ouse fitted up with stoves, retorts, and all the apparatus and reagents necessary for chemical research. At that time my attention was very much directed to the composition of drugs.

The active principle of a number of substances was being discovered at this time, and 111 order to make these substances I sowed on my farm poppies, hemlock, henbane, colchicum, belladonna, &c. Some of these are still growing about the place. Dr A. T. Thomson had suggested a process for making calomel and corrosive sublimate, by burning quick silver In chlorine gas. I undertook to carry out the process on a large scale, and wasted a good deal of time and money on a process which was, in fact, no improvement on the process then in use. Failures, however, have their value, as I found out afterw.ards All this time I had the home farm of about 250 acres in hand. I entered upon it in 1834. Farmers were suffering from the abundance of the crops, and wheat, although rigidly protected, was very low in rice. For three or four years I do not remember that any connection etween chemistry and agriculture passed through my mind but the remark of a gentle man who farmed near me, who pointed out that on one farm bones were invaluable for the turnip crop, and on another farm they were useless, attracted my attention a good deal, especially as I had spent a good deal of money on bones without success. Somewhere about this time a drug-broker in the city of London asked me whether I could make use of precipitated gypsum and spent animal charcoal, both of which substances held at the time no market value. Some tons of these were sent down, and, as sulphuric acid was largely used by me in making chlorine gas, the combination of the two followed.

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