1869.] DOMESTIC AIDS TO GARDEN CULTURE. 91 



beautiful varieties calculated to flourish in any soil which is free from lime, and 

 of an open lumpy texture, and neither spongy nor too finely comminuted. 

 Eedleaf. John Cos. 



DOMESTIC AIDS TO GARDEN CULTURE. 



HAVE stated (p. 4) that the Aid to which I refer, favours the development of 

 sweetness and beauty, and yet is in solemn league with death. It is time to 

 state what it is that can possibly possess such apparently paradoxical qualities. 

 It is House Sewage ! This in the right place strengthens and beautifies 

 life ; in the wrong, it is heavily freighted with the germs of death. By accepting 

 its constant assistance in our gardens, we shall not only impart greater vigour 

 and richer beauty to our favourite flowers, but at the same time strengthen and 

 lengthen our own lives. To explain all this, it will be necessary to advert briefly 

 to a few first principles. These will constitute the theory of my subject, and will 

 lay, I trust, an intelligible basis for a most useful and profitable practice, that it 

 will be my aim hereinafter to enforce. 



It must be obvious to every one that, notwithstanding all the cleanliness and 

 beauty that are in the world, there is also much of their opposites. Animal 

 life cannot be sustained without the production of filth or dead matter. Life 

 can only be sustained by the sacrificing of other life. The principle of vicarious- 

 ness is the law of the universe. We, ourselves, can only live through the ministry of 

 death. Not only do life and death co-exist, and combat each other, as all admit, 

 but they likewise sustain the scarcely suspected relation of cause and effect. It 

 is hard to say, indeed, whether death is more inimical than helpful to life. The 

 two great types of life — the vegetable and animal — seem to work in this matter 

 in opposite directions. The vegetable changes dead matter into living ; the 

 animal, living into dead. Our whole life is a reduction of living substances into 

 dead debris. Many of our employments increase the supply, and our life is often 

 enfeebled, frequently sacrificed, by an excessive production of dead matter. 

 Like rough, harsh grit between cog-wheels, dirt hampers, rasps, stops, or breaks 

 down the delicate machinery of life. 



The production of such matters being the necessary concomitant of animal 

 life, one of our chief duties is to see to their instant removal from our homes, 

 where they can only work to render death, to our gardens, where they can be 

 turned into a new life of beauty and glory. And it is a startling fact, that there 

 is no other efficient way of getting rid of dead matter, than Nature's mode of 

 converting it into living substance. Man has been slow to learn this lesson, and, 

 in fact, has not yet learned it. He has tried all other modes. He has converted 

 the great oceans of air and water into world-wide sewers to carry off his inrpu- 

 rities, but all in vain ; for, Nemesis-like, they have returned to lay fresh siege to 

 his life. He has scattered them to the four winds of heaven on the wings of 

 fire, and occasionally, as in the Plague of London, it has licked up lingering in- 



