1. Attention is drawn to Mason's modification of Livingston's soilpoint method of directly estimating the water-supplying power of a soil in situ. Mason used ordinary lead writing pencils as soil-points.

2. This method, heretofore tested only in the laboratory, has been employed by the writer in an ecological field study. Details of the procedure adopted are described, and the reliability of the method is indicated by the presentation of a series of mean results with their corresponding probable errors.

3. It is concluded that the method is practicable; it should prove of considerable usefulness to workers in ecology.

The work undertaken in 1922 was in the main a continuation of that done in 1920 and 1921, the results of which have already been published, and the object of which had been to determine the relation between the size of the seed tuber-sets and their resultant crop, and the further relation between the amount of heavy ware in the crop and the size of the seed.

It is unlikely that as a formulated problem any consideration of settled crop-husbandry is of greater antiquity than the cereal yield problem. In its broad form it embraces all the possible means of increasing the output of grain per unit area. The earliest civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt must have been compelled to explore these means as soon as they began to encounter the limitations to cultivable area which dwelling in fixed communities imposed. Wheat and barley were their principal food stuffs so that the cereal yield problem, the most comprehensive concern of present-day agriculture, goes back to the remotest antiquity. It must have evoked incessant effort along divers lines and the cumulative result is appreciable from a comparison of the best cereal races of to-day and the forms which like Hordeum spontaneum and Triticum dicoccum dicoccoides have been regarded as the progenitor types. Unfortunately it is not possible to trace back very far the sequence of the solution of the problem as constituted by improvements in husbandry and the utilization of better cereal forms. Fragments of information may be culled from the writings of various periods but they are of doubtful value. The author's reliability is often in question, the unit of measure uncertain, and even the identity of the crop a matter of doubt. Herodotus' well-known story, passed on from another, of increases of 200 and even 300 fold yielded by barley in Mesopotamia in 500 B.c. is possibly the oldest fragment. It is difficult to interpret but it gains colour from the further statement that the leaves of the plant were of the width of four fingers. Concerning progress in England, while reasonably precise information goes back no further than forty years, there are widely separated records of sufficient worth to indicate the historical trend. It has been deduced from the Manorial Records that at the time when that system had become established there was a flat rate of about ten bushels per acre for wheat. Much later, when Sir Charles Davenant compiled An Essay upon the Probable Methods of making a People Gainers in the Ballance of Trade (published 1699), he computed the “neat produce” of eight million acres of arable land to be 79 million bushels of grain.

In my previous paper on the electrical determination of moisture in soils (1) I reserved the question of possible effects of soil salt movement in vitiating the conclusions therein reached as to the usefulness of the electrical method in practice. The present communication contains an account of some experiments carried out with a view to settling this point.

In the study of animal nutrition valuable information has been obtained from feeding experiments, the results of which depend upon the liveweight test. These results, however, deal only with the relative values of different foodstuffs and methods of feeding, and the accumulated data are, on the whole, not of such a nature that general physiological laws can be deduced from them. For the elucidation of such laws, it is necessary to carry out metabolic experiments by which the transformation of energy and material within the body can be studied with some degree of precision.

In a recent paper dealing with the changes which occur during the ensilage of oats and tares, Amos and Woodman (1) indicate that drainage is an important source of loss during ensilage and record that the drainage liquid has been found to contain varying quantities, between 4 and 10 per cent., of soluble material. No analysis of this soluble material is given.

A series of measurements of wire diameter, length of side, and area of holes, has been made on new and used sieves, all of which were originally of the “100 mesh” size, i.e. the square holes were supposed to be ·01″ in length of side and the wire to be ·01″ in diameter. The measurements have been expressed as frequency curves.

In the case of unused sieves woven to the I.M.M. specification, the sieve on the whole compared well with the specification, but in used sieves the variations were much greater. The divergence from specification in the new and old sieves is shown by Tables I and II respectively.

In one sieve (No. 2) the holes elongated more in one direction than the other. In fact in one direction the alteration which has taken place is a contraction rather than a stretch. This effect was probably connected with the manner in which the sieve was attached to its metal framework, and also to difference in tempering of the wires and the tension in weaving.

A number of the frequency curves showed double peaks, and the actual observations showed that there was a systematic distribution of values corresponding to these two peaks. It is probable that some of the guides in one of the combs through which the warp wires are led during the weaving were displaced sideways, thus giving alternate strands of wire and narrow holes. This was particularly the case in the single weave.

In 1913 the National Association of Millers was invited by the Board of Agriculture to formulate a definition of the term “Millers' Offals.” After some discussion the Association forwarded the following resolution: “That millers' offals, or wheaten offals sold as such, are the products of wheat and of the vegetable substances extracted from the wheats of commerce in the process of cleaning; but the proportion of such extraneous matter shall not exceed the percentage found in the wheats imported into the United Kingdom.”