It was the British music critic Neville Cardus, writing on Debussy, who
remarked how "the great sea of Wagner threatened to overwhelm the world
of nineteenth century music". 1 There is an analogy in mid-nineteenth-
century agriculture where the great sea of Justus von Liebig developed a
tidal wave which to this day conceals much of the original work and
merit of others in the same field. Not only the general public but even
students of agriculture may, or may not, recall the names of Persoz,
Kuhlmann and Ville in France, Thaer and Sprengel in Germany, or even
Lawes and Gilbert in England, to mention a few of them, whose pioneer
works were not pub- licised in the same didactic and polemical manner as
those of Liebig. Among such pioneers was Jean Baptiste Boussingault
(1802-1887) whose funda- mental researches contributed to the emergence
of agriculture from an empirical corpus of facts to the status of a
science. Yet apart from his work in animal and crop science he also
engaged in metallurgical investigations, biology and pure chemistry. The
scientific world was already approaching the end of an era in which it
was possible to embrace several disciplines adequately. With increasing
specialisation, institutionalism and profeSsionalism in science the
polymath was a gradually disappearing species.