196 REPORT OF COMMISSIONER OF FISH AND FISHERIES. 



An allusion to the practice of the Indians in this respect may be found 

 in George Mourt's " Kelation or Journal of the beginning and Proceed- 

 ings of the English Plantation settled at Plimoth, in New England, by 

 certain English Adventurers both Merchants and others." * # * 

 "London, 1G22": " We set the last spring some twenty acres of Indian 

 corn, and sowed some six acres of barley and peas, and, according to the 

 manner of Indians, we manured our ground with herrings, or rather 

 shads, which we have in great abundance and take with great ease at 

 our doors. Our corn did prove well, and God be praised, we had a good 

 increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good."* * * * 



Again, in Edward Johnson's " Wonder-working Providence of Sion's 

 Saviour in New England, Being a Relation of the firste planting in New 

 England in the yeere 1628, London, 1654," written in 1652, the author 

 says : " But the Lord is pleased to provide for them [the colonists] great 

 store of fish in the spring-time, especially alewives, about the biguesse 

 of a herring. Many thousands of these they used to put under their 

 Indian corne, which they plant in Hills five foot asunder ; and assuredly 

 when the Lord created this corne, hee had a special! eye to supply these 

 his peoples wants with it, for ordinarily five or six grains doth produce 

 six hundred."! 



Use at the beginning of the present century and later. 



269. Menhaden do not appear to have been much used by agricultur- 

 ists of Cape Cod in the beginning of this century, though the old record 

 shows that the horse-shoe crab and sea-weed were extensively applied. 



In 1792 the Hon. Ezra L'Hommedieu, of New York, published a paper 

 in the New York Agricultural Transactions % which gives somewhat 

 more accurate data and directions concerning the use of fish as 

 a fertilizer. He says : " Experiments made by using the fish called 

 menhaden or mosbankers as a manure have succeeded beyond all 

 expectation. * * * In dunging corn in the holes, put two in 

 a hill on any kind of soil where corn will grow, and you will have 

 a good crop." He recommends them as a top-dressing for grass. 

 " Put them on a piece of poor loamy land, at the distance of fifteen 

 inches from each other, * * * and by their putrefaction they so 

 enrich the land that you may mow about two tons per acre." But he 

 adds, very wisely, " how long this manure will last has not yet been 

 determined." He gives, in his quaintly interesting way, an account 

 of " an experiment made the last summer by one of my near neighbors, 

 Mr. Tuthill, in raising vegetables with this fish manure," which is worth 

 citing as an illustration of the curious combinations of truth and error, 

 which, in their lack of definite knowledge of the laws of plant-growth 

 and the action of manures, the theorizers of that time invented. 



* Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc, 2d series, IX, 1832, p. 60. 

 t Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc, 2d series, III, 1816, 158. 

 % See Appendix O. 



