The Council of the Royal Agricultural Society have published a statement of members' privileges which is worth attention. On payment of a moderate fee the advice of a competent veterinary inspector can be had in cases of disease among the live-stock; post-mortem examinations can be made, and the animals may be sent to the Brown Institution, Wandsworth Road, London, where the Professor-Superintendent undertakes 'to carry out such investigations relating to the nature, treatment, and prevention of diseases of cattle, sheep, and pigs, as may be deemed expedient by the Council of the Society.' Reports on the cases are drawn up quarterly, or specially as may be required. Analyses of guano and other fertilisers, of soils, of water, of vegetable products, may be had; also reports on seeds, with determination of the quantity of weeds mingled among them; on vegetable parasites; on diseases of farm-crops. And besides all this, any member whose lands are infested by noxious intruders may have a 'determination of the species of any insect, worm, or other animal, which, in any stage of its life, injuriously affects the farm-crops, with a report on its habits, and suggestions as to its extermination.'
Experiments on the fattening of animals by Messrs Lawes and Gilbert help to settle the much-debated question as to whether fat is produced exclusively from nitrogenous food or not. Their conclusion is, that excess of nitrogen contributes to growth but not to fatness. 'There is, of course,' they say, 'a point below which the proportion of nitrogenous substance in the food should not be reduced; but if this be much exceeded, the proportion of the increase, and especially of the fat-increase, to the nitrogenous substance consumed, rapidly decreases; and it may be stated generally, that taking our current fattening food-stuffs as they are, it is their supply of digestible non-nitrogenous, rather than of nitrogenous constituents which guides the amount, both of the food consumed and of the increase produced, by the fattening animal.'
Since the outbreak of discussion on spontaneous generation and the germ theory, many readers have become familiar with the term Bacteria, by which certain minute organisms are described. The question involved may be studied from different points of view, as appears from a communication addressed to the Royal Society by Dr Downes and Mr Blunt, a chemist, on the Effect of Light upon Bacteria and other Organisms. Properly prepared solutions were inclosed in glass tubes; some of the tubes were placed in sunlight, others were covered with paper or some material that excluded light. The dark tubes became turbid; the light tubes remained clear. The experiments modified in various ways were continued from April to October; and the conclusions that the experimentalists came to were that--Light is inimical to the development of Bacteria and the microscopic fungi associated with putrefaction and decay, its action on the latter being apparently less rapid than upon the former--That the preservative quality of light is most powerful in the direct solar ray, but can be demonstrated to exist in ordinary diffused daylight--and That this preservative quality appears to be associated with the actinic rays of the spectrum. 'It appears to us,' say the two gentlemen, 'that the organisms which have been the subject of our research may be regarded simply as isolated cells, or minute protoplasmic masses specially fitted by their transparency and tenuity for the demonstration of physical influences. May we not expect that laws similar to those which here manifest themselves may be in operation throughout the vegetable, and perhaps also the animal kingdom wherever light has direct access to protoplasm? On the one hand, we have chlorophyll (colouring substance of leaves, &c.) owing its very existence to light, and whose functions are deoxidising; on the other, the white protoplasm or germinal matter oxidising in its relations, and to which, in some of its forms at least, the solar rays are not only non-essential, but even devitalising and injurious.