1864.] CHEMISTRY OP MANURES. 193 



weight of a little dust in the pan of a balance. Unless the weight 

 of that dust (the available ash-c »nstituents of the soil) remain 

 year aft r year a constant quantity, the husbandman, howsoever 

 prosperous he may seem to be, pursues a downward roa ! ; and he 

 is fatally preparing for himself or his posterity, impoverishment 

 and final ruin. 



DisPROPdRTiONATE MANURING. — Nay more : the weight, of 

 ash in the balance may even be annually increased, by a proiuse 

 manuring of the soil, and yet exhaustion and ruin may impend. 

 This will be the result, if one of the fixed aliments— phosphoric 

 acid for example — be added to the soil in superabundance, with- 

 out proportionate supplies of other cinereal constituents, — say for 

 example, silica or potash. So, again, if manures which, like 

 guano, are at once nitrogenous and phosphatic, but not propor- 

 tionately rich in all the cinereal elements of plant-food, be em- 

 ployed in excess, the farming will be higher still, the crops more 

 luxuriant, the " prosperity " more brilliant than ever, and the 

 catastrophe proportionately nearer the more disastrous. 



The practice of multiplying cattle on a farm, and of fattening 

 them with the oil of purchased oil-cake, in order that the ash of 

 the cake, after passing through their bodies, may become available 

 for the cinereal replenishment of the soil, is another form of high 

 farming, at present very much in fashion. But, broadly viewed, 

 with reference not to individual but to collective interests, this 

 system also will be found to originate in anr oversight, and to end 

 in an illusion. The facts overlooked are, that oil-cake purchased, 

 is also, of necessity, oil-cake sold ; that all oil-cake is the produce 

 of land ; and that, consequently, what one farm gains, another 

 loses, when oil-cake changes hands. The ash of oil-cake, together 

 with the fertility, immediate or prospective, which that ash 

 represents, is a fixed quantity, which commerce may serve to 

 distribute, but cannot possibly increase. The distributive opera- 

 tion may be more or less useful to vary the apportionment of 

 fertility in space and time. But cake-fed cattle are not, as they 

 are frequently supposed to be, a source of cinereal manure ; and 

 the practice which grows out of this illusory belief is but one 

 inore, and not the least dangerous in its tendency, of the fashion- 

 able agricultural abuses decorated with the name of high 

 farm ing. 



Should high farming, in either or all of these spurious 



ToL. I. ir No. 3. 



