440 New Experimenis on some of 
the return its fostering influence must have given, and adding 
to the soil a quality it never would have relinquished, and con- 
tinued yearly gratefully to repay. 
In travelling over the country, it has often most forcibly struck 
me, that Scotland must have been, at some very remote period 
of its history, under a far more extensive system of cultivation 
than it is at the present highly improved and enlightened state 
of the nation; and conducted with a knowledge and skill that 
the present incumbents are not very apt to allow their forefathers 
to have possessed. There are fields and pasture walks that bear 
strong and marked impressions of long continued cultivation, of 
which even the unprecedented prices of the late war have never 
tempted the present occupants to resume the ploughing. I am 
also of opinion, that the use of lime as a manure has been known 
to the cultivators of antiquity; not from any remains of it that 
can be traced in the soil, except the comparison of colour be- 
tween the infield and outfield land; but from the extensive ex- 
cavations of various lime rocks, which never could have been 
otherwise consumed. The royal residence, the baronial keep- 
safe, or churches and religious establishments, were the prin- 
cipal, perhaps the only architectural applications of this mineral 
in the early ages, ‘The humble vassal and dependant were lite- 
rally burrowed in the earth. But I am inclined to think that 
much of that excavation of lime must have been long before the 
commencement of ecclesiastical history, (from no monkish re- 
cords being to be found regarding this,) and when the nation 
must have been far more populous than it is at present. No 
farmer could ever be stimulated to plough and raise grain with- 
out an adequate compensation; grain could only be cultivated 
to feed and be consumed. The ploughing and consumption of 
any country must always bear a due proportion ; domestic con- 
sumption alone must have been the object, &c. 
Yours ever, 
Gavin INGLIs. 
LXVII. New Exteriments on some of the Combinations of Phos- 
phorus. By Sir H. Davy, LL.D. F.R.S. Vice Pres. R.I.* 
Ts a paper published in the Transactions of the Royal Society, 
for 1812, I have detailed a number of experiments on phospho- 
rus, from which I deduced the composition of some of its com- 
pounds with oxygen, with hydrogen,.and with chlorine. Since 
the appearance of this paper,various researches have been brought 
forward on the same subject, in which some results, differing very 
* From the Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1818, Part I. 
much 
