210 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



But, in regard to night-soil, I will say, that where it is spread 

 upon your gardens, if it is pure, and from healthy persons, I 

 doubt whether it will contaminate the vegetables that you 

 raise ; but if it proceeds from unhealthy, malarious, typhoid, 

 diphtheretic diseases, I fear it will carry the seeds of de- 

 struction, not only to your vegetables, but to the people 

 who consume them. I know that those vegetables are not 

 of that fine flavor, that good taste, that fine quality, that 

 vegetables are that are raised from the chemicals. You all 

 know, that, if you use pig-dung on your vegetables, you get 

 vegetables that are rank, unpleasant, and of bad flavor. 

 Carry it still farther, into your tobacco-crop, — and pig- 

 manure is a very good article for that purpose, — but when 

 you use that tobacco in any form, either to smoke or chew, 

 it is so unpleasant, that even the oldest tobacco smoker or 

 chewer will reject it in disgust. 



Now, gentlemen, here is the question with me. I origi- 

 nally manufactured fertilizers which I put on the market 

 for thirty dollars, forty dollars, and fifty dollars. I saw, as 

 I went along, that the whole course of legislation in Massa- 

 chusetts was founded on wrong principles. I applied to 

 the Legislature of Massachusetts, to their agricultural com- 

 mittee; and I received no support from them. I was acting, 

 I can say truthfully, honestly in the interest of agriculture. 

 I appealed, in the address which I made at Barre, to the 

 farmers to try a certain course of experiment, so that every 

 man, no matter how ignorant, or how unversed he was 

 in chemistry, or in any of the agricultural sciences, might 

 know the facts by actual observation and experience of his 

 own, and take no man's word for it. Every farmer should 

 know himself, and should know by observation, by experi- 

 ence ; and that is one great thing that is lacking in the 

 agricultural community, that they take no observations. You 

 take a cabbage-leaf, and one side of it will heal a sore, and 

 the other side will keep that sore open. 



In fertilizers, the law, as it now stands, requires every 

 manufacturer of commercial fertilizers, the price of which is 

 fifteen dollars a ton and upwards, to state how much soluble 

 phosphoric acid there is in it, how much reverted, and how 

 much insoluble, and from what source that insoluble comes. 

 It also requires him to state what amount of nitrogen it 



