the people.  To this end potato-drying establishments must be multiplied; these will turn out a rough product for feeding animals, and a better sort for table use.  It may be added here that the Prussian Government last Autumn decided to give financial aid to agricultural organizations for erecting drying plants; also, that the Imperial Government has decreed that potatoes up to a maximum of 30 per cent. may be used by the bakers in making bread—­a measure which will undoubtedly make the grain supply suffice till the 1915 crop is harvested.  It is further recommended that more vegetables be preserved, whether directly in cold storage or by canning or pickling.  Moreover, the industrial use of fats suitable for human food (as in making soaps, lubricating oils, &c.) must be stopped, and people must eat less meat, less butter, and more vegetables.  Grain must not be converted into starch.  People must burn coke rather than coal, for the coking process yields the valuable by-product of sulphate of ammonia, one of the most valuable of fertilizers, and greatly needed by German farmers now owing to the stoppage of imports of nitrate of soda from Chile.

In considering how the German people may keep up their production of food, the authors find that various factors will work against such a result.  In the first place, there is a shortage of labor, nearly all the able-bodied young and middle-aged men in the farming districts being in the war.  There is also a scarcity of horses, some 500,000 head having already been requisitioned for army use, and the imports of about 140,000 head (chiefly from Russia) have almost wholly ceased.  The people must therefore resort more extensively to the use of motor plows, and the State Governments must give financial assistance to insure this wherever necessary; and such plows on hand must be kept more steadily in use through company ownership or rental.  It may be remarked here, again, that the Prussian Government is also assisting agricultural organizations to buy motor plows.  The supply of fertilizers has also been cut down by the war.  Nitrate has just been mentioned.  The authors recommend that the Government solve this problem by having many of the existing electrical plants turn partly to recovering nitrogen from the atmosphere.  This, they say, could be done without reducing the present production of electricity for ordinary purposes, since only 19 per cent. of the effective capacity of the 2,000,000 horse power producible by the electrical plants of Germany is actually used.  The supply of phosphoric fertilizers is also endangered through the stoppage of imports of phosphate rock (nearly 1,000,000 tons a year) as well as the material from which to make sulphuric acid; also, through the reduction in the production of the iron furnaces of the country, from the slag of which over 2,000,000 tons of so-called Thomas phosphate flour was produced, will involve a big reduction in the make of that valuable fertilizer.  Thus, there is a lack of horses, of fertilizers, and of the guiding hand of man.  This last, however, can be partly supplied by utilizing for farm work such of the prisoners of war as come from the farm.  As Germany now holds considerably more than 600,000 prisoners, it can draw many farm laborers from among them.  Prisoners are already used in large numbers in recovering moorland for agricultural purposes.