378 



THE FARMER'S MAGAZINE. 



PLATE II. 

 A ROUGH CUSTOMER," 



^^ The thorouL(li-bred terrier, though an active, 

 sagacious animal, and very fond of hunting, is 

 nevertheless a very careful one, and kills a rat 

 more by cunning than courage. He likes to wait 

 his opportunity, and catch the rat while running, 

 so as to give him a nip without having a bite in re- 

 turn. This you may say is sound generalship. So 

 far so good. But if there happen to be thirty rats 

 present, twenty-nine will make their escape while 

 he is fretting over one. Still I am satisfied that 

 if you take dogs in general you will not find more 

 than one in fifty that will kill a rat ; and if you 

 lump all kind of terriers together, both rough and 

 smooth, I am really satisfied that where you will 

 find one that will kill ten rats oflf-hand, you will 

 find ten that will not kill one each without the 

 assistance of their master. They will do all the 

 fretting and barking if the master will do all the 

 thumping and kicking, and thus kill the rat be- 



tween them. But often, when the rat is dead, to 

 the great delight of the master, the dog will give it 

 a most unmerciful shaking, and thereby earn for 

 himself not only a host of caresses, but a wonder- 

 ful reputation. I have, at various times, had at 

 least half-a-hundred terriers of one sort or another, 

 but there was only one of the whole that would 

 kill a full-grown rat single-handed ; but even he 

 was very soon satisfied, since he mostly declined 

 killing a second till another day ; and this I have 

 found to be the case with the great majority of 

 thorough-bred terriers. The truth is, they are too 

 cunning and too soft for such hard work. But 

 when they are bred in with the bull-dog, then you 

 have the most active, resolute, and hardy dog that 

 can be produced ; and all those dogs that have 

 performed such wonderful feats in the art of rat- 

 killing are of this breed." — From The Rat, pub- 

 lished by Routledge and Co, 



MANURE MANUFACTORIES, 



BY CUTHBEKT W. JOHNSON, ESQ., F.E.S. 



The history of the preparation of artificial 

 manures, is a detail full of the most useful in- 

 formation. It aflFords us not merely practical in- 

 formation with regard to the increase of our produce : 

 it yields us other very valuable knowledge. The 

 Blow progress they at first made— the determined 

 opposition that attended their introduction— may 

 well suggust to us the wisdom of considering 

 calmly every suggestion that is offered ; to examine 

 carefully every reported trial with a nev/ manure, 

 even if we doubt the success of the efl^brt. 



It is useless to search for any preparations of 

 artificial manures previous to the present century : 

 it was a subject but httle understood in the days of 

 Jethro TuU, who died in 1740. Engrossed with 

 the construction of agricultural machinery, and 

 with the good effects of pulverizing the soil, he 

 had no opinion of manures : he even doubted the 

 necessity of using that of the farm-yard. In the 

 year after the death of the immortal author of the 

 drill and the horse-hoe husbandry, Arthur Young 

 was born — a friend of his country's farmers, as 

 warm and as able as TuU, but with other and com- 

 prehensive views. Young was not thirty years of 

 age when, in 1769, he commenced that extra- 

 ordmary series of experiments with manures, which 

 he pursued in a great variety of forms for so many 

 years {Annals of Agriculture, vol, ii. p. 17), com- 

 mencmg with comparative trials on the effects of 

 the excrements of our domestic animals— the cow, 

 horse, pig, poultry, ashes, &c., salt, soot, the earths, 



&c. We find him next employed upon trials with 

 train oil, bones, ammonia, tartrate of potash, &c. 

 {ibid, vol. iii. p. 67), Young never hesitated to try 

 the effect of even the most unpromising substances. 

 Thus we find him in 1784 using muriatic acid, 

 nitric acid, sulphuric acid, alone or mixed with 

 charcoal (liirf, p. 121-122). That he had all the 

 modest candour of the true man of genius, peeps 

 out on many occasions during these long anfl 

 laborious trials, which were generally conducted 

 on a small scale. He thus sums up the results of 

 his inquiries during thirteen years experimen- 

 tahzing {ibid, p. 127). "After all, I wish the reader 

 to consider these minute experiments as nothing 

 more than weak inquiries, and an insufficient pur- 

 suit of hints caught slowly, and with difficulty. I 

 My wings are tied from the bolder flights that my 1 

 wishes point to. The whole field is interesting, and 

 almost untrodden ground. "But every step leads 

 to connections with other inquiries that I cannot J 

 partake of: all depends on chemistry." ^ 



When Arthur Young was thus writing, Davy 

 was a boy at Penzance. It was a quarter of a 

 century after this that he came out as the first agri- 

 cultural chemist of his day — a period which Young 

 was happily spared to witness. Davy urged, and 

 enforced experimentally, the importance of an ex- 

 tended examination of artificial and ordinary 

 manures. When the grave closed over this cele- 

 brated chemist in 1829, much progress had been 

 made in the increase of our knowledge in this great 



