Maaurial Properties of Clay from Gas-Works.^ 299 



vent the escape of the natural moisture of the hoof, and at the 

 same time be emollient, adhesive, not too fluid, and free from 

 any irritant. 



Various causes have combined during the last few years to 

 enhance the value of horses of every description, and it has be- 

 come incumbent on every one, whose attention may have been 

 particularly called to the subject, to communicate any information 

 his experience and careful observation has supplied him with, and 

 which he believes may be of use to his neighbours, by arousing 

 them from the state of apathy into which many of them have 

 permitted themselves to fall concerning a matter of so much 

 importance to them commercially and personally as the soundness 

 of their horses' feet. 



Dixfield, December, 1857. 



XI. — On the Manurial Properties of Clay from Gas- Works. 

 By the Rev. VV. R. BowDITCH. 



Increase of population demands a corresponding increase in the 

 production of food, or a proportional rise in price of the quantity 

 produced. In thinly-peopled countries the extra demand is met 

 by the culture of fresh land, and no necessity exists for raising the 

 acreable produce of that in cultivation. But when the soil of a 

 country which will pay for culture is already productive, the 

 only mode of increasing the quantity of home-grown lood in that 

 country is the obtaining a larger yield per acre by improved 

 culture. The basis of all remunerative agriculture is manure, 

 and though we hear much of the sufliciency of atmospheric nitro- 

 gen and read elaborate arguments on the growth of forests and 

 prairies, practical farmers of all classes know that the produce, 

 and therefore the profit of their farms, depends chieliy upon 

 the liberal supply of good manure. Proof of this is found 

 in the readiness with which guano was purchased and used, and 

 the steady perseverance in the use of this valuable manure, despite 

 high price and unprint ipled adulteration by second-hand dealers. 

 No future historian will write the history of the first half of the 

 nineteenth century without devoting a page to the multiplication 

 of food due to the introduction of guano, and eulogizing the 

 readiness with which a great people paid millions a year for the 

 excrement of birds from barren islands in the Pacific. 



The high price of guano, and the offer of the thousand pounds 

 prize by the Royal Agricultural Society, have given a great 



