MANURES. 25 



only half-dressed the land, and thus lessened our crops, on the 

 other. Our business, however, is not to seek the agency of 

 more than we can obtain among ourselves. The Chinese 

 waste nothing : they submit to offensive smells, to menial 

 emplo}Tnents, to incessant disagreeable occupations, in carrying 

 from house to house the very worst refuse, and apply it to 

 their land. And be it remembered, that there was a time 

 when we paid to have our cesspools emptied, and the contents 

 carried away, without our knowing the value, while those so 

 employed removed it to uninhabited places, to convert it to 

 manure and money. Our advancing civilization and cleanli- 

 ness, so called, led to what people denominated improvements, 

 and sent the filth down the common sewers, to contaminate 

 the waters Ave were obliged to drink, and poison the fish in 

 our finest streams. In London, the very Thames, which vied 

 AAdth thousands of rivers in the abundance of fish, and the 

 purity of its waters, has become a reeking, moving mass of 

 filth, hardly surpassed by the very sewers which for miles are 

 emptying their disgusting contents, labelled or numbered all 

 along its banks, and render putrid and foul the whole mass of 

 waters, on which a thousand boats are carrying their living 

 freights dailj'', to enjoy the convenience, at the expense of 

 breathing a pestilential atmosphere, not many degrees better 

 than those very nuisances which on a much smaller scale are 

 supposed or pretended to be the cause «jf a mysterious but 

 fatal malady. Such are our present notions of cleanliness, 

 that we gape at a gnat and swallow a camel. We grumble at 

 every little open gutter that gives off its effluvia to compara- 

 tively endless space, and pollute a whole river by directing 

 the filth and offal of two milhons of people to three or four 

 miles of the only river we can drink from. Connected with 

 this subject, we can only recommend everybody that has a 

 rod of ground to use it, to appropriate the waste of his own 

 house. Contrive all the means at hand to abate the nuisance, 

 but bury it in his own land, that he may reap the benefit of it. 

 Let not a basin of soapsuds, or of dirty water, go for nothing, 

 but remember that it is all convertible to dressing for the 

 ground, and will confer a real benefit on the garden or the field. 

 Liquid ^Manures are made of all the animal dungs ; but 

 those which live exclusively on vegetation are the best for 

 general purposes, — cows and oxen, sheej), rabbits, deer, and 

 horses ; and all these are the better when the vegetable that 



