THE FARMER'S MAGAZINE. 



263 



taken part, was one of the greatest delusions that was 

 ever attempted to be thrust down the throat of the 

 British farmer by the combined efforts of official com- 

 missioners and amateur agriculturists. He was about 

 to lay before them a collection of facts of undoubted 

 authenticity, which would, he thought, carry conviction 

 to the minds of all present. He had listened with great 

 pleasure to Mr. Mechi's paper ; he was sure the Club 

 always listened with pleasure to a speech from the Alder- 

 man, however much they might differ from his conclu- 

 sions ; he was always amusing, and often witty and 

 eloquent, so that his talents inspired not less admiration 

 than his many amiable and social qualities ; but, at the 

 same time, he must excuse him for saying that he was 

 not an agricultural authority at the Farmers' Club 

 (laughterj. He might be an agricultural authority at 

 the Court of Aldermen, or among landlords who knew 

 a great deal more about horseflesh than about farming; 

 but he was not an agricultural authority among rent- 

 paying farmers. On the present occasion their excellent 

 friend rode in on the shoulders of an elephant — Baron 

 Liebig, who had made two very bold assertions: first, 

 that British agriculture was gradually deteriorating — 

 that the system adopted by British farmers was as 

 poisonous as that adopted by the Roman farmers, 

 that they were wasting and wearing out the soil; and 

 secondly, that the agriculture of this country could only 

 be renovated by having recourse to the sewage of towns. 

 Now Baron Liebig was a very great man ; but, like 

 many other great, men, he had made great mistakes: 

 and he utterly failed when he applied himself to practical 

 agriculture (Hear, hear). Baron Liebig some years 

 ago printed a book which he, no doubt, sincerely wished 

 was buried in oblivion. He happened to have a copy 

 of that book, which proved that the great Professor 

 was not infallible ; and as he was mistaken then it was 

 more than probable that he was mistaken now. In 1845 

 he said (this was one of the greatest mistakes ever 

 made in reference to practical agriculture) that Eng- 

 land was being thoroughly ruined by its system of 

 thorough drainage. " During moist and rainy springs 

 and summers, the phosphates and other salts with 

 alkaline bases, also the soluble ammoniacal salts, are 

 entirely or partly removed. The system of draiJiing 

 which of late has been so extensively folloived in Eng- 

 land brings the land into the state of a great filter, 

 through ivhich the soluble alkalies are drawn off in 

 consequence of the percolation of the rain, and it 

 (England) must become more deficient in its soluble 

 efficacious elements." In other words. Baron Liebig 

 asserted that the land must become more and more 

 barren because it was drained. He then went on to say, 

 " I have succeeded in combining the efficacious elements 

 of manure in such a manner that they will not be 

 washed away, and thus their efficacy will be doubled. 

 The injurious consequences of the present system of 

 draining are by this manure removed — agriculture is 

 placed upon certain principles as well arranged as 

 manufactures." What has been the result of the great 

 German chemist's prophecy and promise ? Why the 

 draining system he condemned had proved one of the 

 greatest improvements ever introduced into agriculture ; 

 and the manure he had recommended had proved utterly 

 worthless. So much by way of reason for doubting the 

 infallibility of Baron Liebig. He (Mr. Sidney) denied 

 that there was any similarity between the Roman system 

 of agriculture, to which in his warning note Baron Liebig 

 called the attention of our farmers, and the system pur- 

 sued in England. " Roman agriculture was of the 

 simplest description — a crop of grain and a fallow, the 

 arable land being manured once in six years, and in that 

 time bearing three grain crops and one green crop." The 

 result was, that the selling price and rent of land declined 

 ■ — that the price of wheat rose from 3s. 6d. to 10s, in 



the time of Cato, to 60s. in the time of Pliny. The 

 whole anxiety of the Roman authors was not for pro- 

 gress, but to prevent decline ; and between the time of 

 Varro and that of Columella the produce was reduced 

 from 23 bushels to 12 ; while the price of wheat rose, 

 the price and rent of land declined. " The great dis- 

 tinction," said Gisborne, " between Roman agriculture 

 and ours is this : theirs was precise, correct, regular, 

 persevering, careful, but altogether unelastic. Ours is 

 coarse, without system, inaccurate, often wasteful, but 

 full of resource. They saw their produce dwindle, and 

 their country become more and more dependent on im- 

 portation for daily bread, with every temptation in prices, 

 but found no remedy." In his (Mr. SidnRy's) opinion, 

 this talking about the decline of the iertility of the 

 British soil, when they knew very well that the farms 

 which had been best and longest cultivated were also the 

 most fertile, was a mere piece of clap-trap used in order 

 to excite attention to the fallacies about to follow. He 

 would now turn to another piece of clap-trap — the refer- 

 ence to China for a lesson. Did those who recorpmended 

 China as an example know what sort of country it really 

 was ? It was a country where at the corner of every street 

 and of every dozen houses and by the road-side, in all 

 directions, there was a privy. Everybody who passed 

 was expected to resort to this privy, and as the popu- 

 lation of China was very dense, and labourers could be 

 had in abundance for twopence a-day, the manure was 

 carried away in a solid, not in a liquid state, and the 

 results under a Chinese sun were highly satisfactory. 

 Now, he asked whether the feelings and habits or the 

 wages of the people of this country would permit the 

 adoption of such a system as that ? If not, all that 

 was said about the matter was mere rhetoric. More- 

 over, they could not bring the climate of China to this 

 country any more than they could bring the climate 

 of Egypt, Lombardy, and other irrigating countries 

 which were constantly quoted as examples for them to 

 follow. He perfectly agreed with Mr. Mechi, that if 

 the sewage of large towns was to be used at all, it 

 could only be had in a liquid form. The people were 

 not prepared to give up their water supply in order to 

 save a manure which was not even saleable in London. 

 He agreed with him that in small towns and in 

 villages a great mistake had been made in adopting 

 an elaborate system of sewage, that it would have been 

 much better to have adhered to a rational system of 

 cesspools and had the manure carried to the land in a 

 solid form ; but he also concurred in his opinion that 

 in the case of great towns, and particularly in that of 

 London, if they wished to turn the sewage to account, 

 they could only do so by using it as liquid manure. And 

 the question turned, not whether liquid manure was 

 fertilizing, but whether it would pay for machinery and 

 pumping. With respect to the advantage of using liquid 

 manure, the question was by no means a new one. He 

 remembered that when it was introduced in that club 

 about six years ago, he said what he now repeated, that 

 he was quite tired of hearing of experiments in a wine- 

 glass, and of crops which might be carried away in a 

 wheelbarrow, and he was sure the members of the Club 

 generally must be also weary of such old stories as those 

 of the Edinburgh and Mansfield sewage meadows, or of 

 Mr. Chadwick's extraordinary crop of cabbages with 

 liquid manure mixed in a hogshead (Laughter). The 

 idea of sewage manure cultivation was first introduced 

 to the British public in 1844, when Mr. Smith, of 

 Deanston, published his description of the Edinburgh 

 water meadows. The old town of Edinburgh stood on 

 a hill : there were some two hundred acres of sandy 

 land below: the sewage was directed to that land, and 

 the result was that very extraordinary crops were grown at 

 the cost of a most extraordinary nuisance. The nuisance, 

 indeed, was so very great that, keen as the Scotch were 



