Philip Pusey / [Sir Ernest Clarke].

  • Clarke, Ernest, Sir.
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Philip Pusey / [Sir Ernest Clarke]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    “ the diffusion of agricultural information.” The management of this Journal was entrusted to a Committee, of which Mr. Pusey was elected Chairman; but from the first the editorial control was placed exclusively in his hands. Mr. Pusey was already a Quarterly Reviewer,1 and the Journal was modelled somewhat on the lines of that review, and was placed in the hands of Mr. Murray as publisher. Even as early as 1844 the Journal had made its mark, for the “Quarterly Review5' (Ixxiii. p. 481) said of it:— The Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England will be a permanent monument to the honourable member for the county of Berks, whose patriotic earnestness of purpose induced him to take on himself the gratuitous labour of its editorship. The same spirit of zealous endeavour to assist in teaching the farmers of England to meet the necessities of the times has prompted Mr. Pusey, not only to prepare for the press the contributions of others, but also to enrich its pages with several most instructive articles from his own skilful pen on the recent improvements in agriculture, and on its actual condition in some of our counties where it is most advanced. And Earl Cathcart, Chairman of the Journal Committee at a later date, observed in 1874 that Mr. Pusey’s agricultural life may find a fitting monument in the Journal. He edited the Journal from the first, and until his lamented and premature decease in 1855. A man of high character and sober judgment, Mr. Pusey was at once a philosopher and a man of business ; a man in advance of his age. u Practice with Science,” the motto of the Society, his characteristic and oft-repeated words, even he thought more desirable than probable. Pusey was a natural leader of men, endowed by nature with that indescrib¬ able essence called genius.2 As Lord Cathcart suggests, “ Practice with Science ” was, at the time of the Society’s formation, more an aspiration than a reality. It is true that long before that date Sir Humphry Davy had tried to join science in close connection with the practice of agriculture; but, interesting as were the lectures of Davy, and the researches of Saussure and of Boussingault, there was only imperfect knowledge of the nutrition of plants, or even of the materials necessary for their growth. Such know¬ ledge could not, in fact, arise until chemists had more complete acquaintance with the mineral constituents of plants derived from the soil, and other elements concerned in the nutrition of plants. It was in the year 1840 that Liebig published his famous book on the Chemistry of Agriculture,3 * a work from 1 See Smiles’ Murrays, vol. ii. p 378. 2 Journal R.A.S.E. 2nd seiies, vol. x. 1874, p. 527. 3 Liebig’s Organic Chemistry in its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology, published in Brunswick, 1840. English edition, edited by Dr, L} on Playfair, London, 1840.
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