290 Agriculture and Chemistry. 
where, and everywhere extolled. The learned German, in- 
deed, had a little overrated the state of chemical knowledge 
in England; and his work, though perfectly intelligible to 
any student of chemistry, was certainly not understood by 
nine out of ten of those who read and admired it amongst 
ourselves. But it was something new, and from a great 
authority ; and the doctrines and discoveries which it pro- 
fessed to make known were announced in a tone so bold and 
confident, even beyond the ordinary precedents, that it is 
not to be wondered at if the country gentlemen and farmers ~ 
of England believed that a new and golden era was about to 
dawn upon them. The learned chemist not only shewed, 
that neither the chemists of his own country, nor of any _ 
other, had understood anything about the matter before, but 
rated, in good set terms, the dunderheaded farmers them- 
selves for their past ignorance, and gave them to understand 
that they had been all along groping like moles in the mud 
which they thought they had been cultivating, and had known 
nothing at all of what they had been thinking about all their 
lives, until chemistry had come to their.assistance. He de- 
nounced farmyard muck as being quite unscientific ; eulogised 
ammonia to the skies, as the only source of fertility, and 
dismissed some other sources of fertility, as existing, not 
in the soil, but in the imagination of chemists; and pre- 
dicted that the time would come when farmers would get 
rid of their cumbrous apparatus of muck-wains, and, in place 
of the dirty material itself, would get silicates and phosphates, 
which they could manufacture for themselves. The thing 
took amazingly, and our honest countrymen were all eager 
to become “ scientific farmers.”” Many, we may suppose, ad- 
vanced so far as to get hold of some of the words of the lan- 
guage, before so strange to them. They could now call the 
glauber salts, which their doctors had so often made them 
swallow, sulphate of soda; the saltpetre, with which their 
cooks had so often powdered their beef, nitrate of potash; 
and the salt which entered into all their messes, chloride of 
sodium. The learned chemist followed up his victory with 
vigour. He announced a grand manure of his own com- 
pounding, which, of course, was to supply to the ground the 
precise quantity of silicates, phosphates, &c., which the grow- 
