Abstract

This paper was freely illustrated by diagrams and charts which greatly helped the audience in following the paper. Mr. G. A. D. Sturat said that the paper threw a new light on the method of conduct- ing Field experiments. In his capacity as the Director of Agiculture he often had to prepare short popular summaries of the Scientific reports from the various Agricultural Stations and he used to find difficulties in presenting results which were not sufficiently conclusive. He asked the audience to remember that even if a small but real increase could be made in the out turn of a crop like paddy the bene- fits accuring therefrom will be great. He recently made a calculation and found that in paddy an increase in yield of even 1% will put into the pockets of the ryots an additional sum of 50 lakhs of Rupees for this Presidency alone. Mr. R. Thomas remarked that it will take a very long time indeed if they were to wait for the experimental error to be worked out for each individual crop. All that was needed was to select strains which showed fairly large differences and the value of the method is amply vindicated by the success which has attended Mr. Howard's work in Wheat and Mr. Clouston's work in cottons. In the District Farms some work is done on the standardization of plots but the results are not published. The cotton sfrains at Koilpatti were selected for differences of over 30 per cent.

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