40 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



a half per acre, which produced sixty bushels of shelled corn 

 per acre that very year. 



It is well known that the silicate of potash is a leading 

 constituent of the hay-crop, and is derived chiefly from 

 irrigation. This was practically demonstrated some years 

 since by an incident, as related by Liebig. During a thunder- 

 storm near Manheim, in Germany, a bolt of lightning struck 

 a hay-stack and reduced it to melted ashes, Avhich became a 

 vitreous stone of the silicate of potash, many people supposing 

 it was an aerolite which had fallen from the heavens ; and it 

 would have been very dithcult for the farmer who sufiered 

 the loss of his hay to convince his unlettered neighbors that 

 that stone embodied the principal chemical ingredient of a 

 hay-stack. 



No practical farmer will undervalue barn-yard manure. It 

 has kept its place as a fertilizer from the earliest ages of 

 agriculture, and embodying as it does such a variety of 

 qualities, will always furnish a ready and potent means 

 of enriching the soil. But the question of cost and supply, 

 and for use in distant fields, the expense of drawing it out 

 and applying it must be considered by the economical and 

 enterprizing farmer in this age of competition. Nearly the 

 entire cotton crop of our country, and a large portion of the 

 agricultural products of Europe, are made without it, and 

 the use of artificial manures has become almost vital to 

 production, because they are cheap as compared with their 

 fertilizing value, light, and easily transported to our fields 

 and economically applied. They are peculiarly suitable for 

 the use of small farmers who cannot aftord to keep large 

 stocks of animals to produce manure, or the labor of manip- 

 ulating it after it is produced, as compared with advan- 

 tages of applying the exact chemical ingredient which his 

 crop requires. In view of this necessity, it becomes the 

 duty of the legislature to protect the fjirmer against the 

 frauds in the manufacture and sale of this commodity. Laws 

 making the adulteration of fertilizers a crime punishable as 

 counterfeiting, would do much to protect us by sending the 

 culprits to the penitentiary. The forger who counterfeits a 

 bank-note, merchant's draft, or raises a check to a larger 

 amount than it was originally drawn for, commits precisely the 



