PROGRESSIVE AGRICULTURE. 159 



importance of the manures well understood, nor the benefits of the 

 application of chemistry to our fields. " For 50 years it has been 

 known, in England, that bone-dust was a fertilizer for grain four- 

 teen times as effective as barn-yard manure." And it was 

 probably in reference to the use of bones that Liebig thought he 

 could judge of the commercial prosperity of a nation, by the 

 quantity of sulphuric acid it used, and Mr. Pusey said it was^a 

 good index of the degree of civilization of a people. A few years 

 since — says a recent writer* — in the little town of Spaulding, in 

 England, 21,000 pounds of sulphuric acid were used in a season in 

 dissolving bones. The bones were purchased even in foreign 

 lands ; our own country was scoured for them ; the imports into 

 England amounted to nearly $1,000,000 a year. Now, however, 

 chemistry has established another fact, viz : that certain stones 

 and masses of rock contain the same fertilizing substances as 

 bones, — phosphate of lime — and by a simple chemical process, 

 these before useless rocks, are converted into the condition of 

 bone-manure, and given as food to crops. 



Specimens of the deposit of phosphate of lime, recently developed 

 in South Carolina, are said to yield eighty or ninety per cent, of 

 pure bone phosphate of lime. How wonderful, that this vast mine 

 of wealth should remain unemployed until this time, when a new 

 power is acting upon the soil, that o^ free labor. 



Mistakes occur in every day practice which dishearten the farmer 

 and keep his profits low. He applies crops to lands naturally un- 

 suited to them, or after they have been exhausted of the elements 

 which the crop he applies requires ; grasses and grains are har- 

 vested at periods when great loss is sustained ; valuable woods for 

 timber and fuel are cut at a time when they are most liable to perish 

 readily, and in most cases seed is wasted by sowing grains broad- 

 cast instead of in drills. On this point I will cite a single instance: 

 An extensive and practical cultivator in England states that 

 upwards of seven-teen million bushels of grain, and peas and beans, 

 are yearly thrown away in that country, in superfluous seed, — 

 independently of the additional produce which might be obtained 

 by the use of the drill. Actual experiments have proved that a 

 bushel of wheat sown in drills will produce an average of three bush- 

 els more than when sown broadcast. This will allow us to multiply 

 the seventeen million by three, and to find an aggregate of fifty-one 

 million of bushels ; thus confirming the statement of tlie writer, 



*Magoun. 



