PHENOL, OR CARBOLIC ACID. 



ITS USES IN AGRICULTURE. 



No feature of the remarkable age in which we live is more 

 noticeable than the wonderful discoveries of science, and their 

 application to useful ends. Among these, the utilization of sub- 

 stances heretofore considered waste, because possessed of unknown 

 properties, figures very largely. In the benefits which have thus 

 accrued, agriculture comes in for a full share. A little more than 

 a quarter of a century will cover the whole term in which manu- 

 factured manures have been introduced to the knowledge of the 

 husbandman. The use of bones, guanos and other substances 

 occurring in nature, containing phosphates and soluble nitrogen, 

 which now contribute so largely to the renovation of run-down 

 soils and to the production of abundant crops, has been mainly 

 within the same period. What has been thus far accomplished is, 

 we believe, but as a feeble dawning of what is in store. In thou- 

 sands of ways at present unknown, scores and hundreds of sub- 

 stances now of no practical utility will doubtless develop into uses 

 in all imaginable and before unthought of directions. 



Only a few years ago, the tar, so plentifully produced as a side 

 product of the manufacture of illuminating gas from coal, scarcely 

 possessed any commercial value whatever. Now we have from it 

 not only various benzines, naphthas and oils of various densities 

 and adapted to divers uses, and the asphaltum so widely used for 

 roofs above our heads and for pavements beneath our feet, but 

 other substances also, including the famous aniline colors, blues, 

 purples, mauve, magenta, etc., surpassing in richness of tints any 

 thing the world before knew. 



The object of penning this paper is, to bring to the notice of 

 farmers a product from coal tar which promises to render them 

 good service and which is yet very little known. It is commonly 

 called Carbolic Acid, sometimes Cresylic Acid, — Phenol, Cresol, 

 also Phenylic Alcohol and Cresylic Alcohol. Its chemistry is 



