40 THE AMERICAN FARMER. 



been added, very few of them contain any appreciable quantities of magnesia or potash. 

 They supply part but not all the materials which soils may lack. 



Many farmers find that guano, fish, and other special fertilizers whose action is quick 

 and stimulating, seems to leave their soil in a more exhausted condition than before they were 

 applied. And the complaint is not uncommon that such fertilizers do not bring the same 

 return as formerly. 



May we not at least question whether the immediate effect of these special fertilizers 

 has not been, in many cases, to aid the plant to use the more available stores of food in the 

 soil, until these latter have become so far exhausted as no longer to respond to the stimulat 

 ing action of these special manures ? 



If the above supposition be correct, it is clear that what such exhausted soils need, is 

 something to supply, not only the nitrogen and phosphoric acid of the guano, or fish, or bone, 

 or superphosphates, or other special fertilizers, but also the potash and other materials that 

 these latter do not furnish. 



Ashes are, for many soils, a standard fertilizer. Places where a tree or a brush-heap 

 has been burned, often show the effects of the manuring for years. It is a trite saying, that 

 The land never forgets ashes. Ashes supply directly all the soil ingredients of plant-food, 

 except nitrogen. Their indirect action is also very important in rendering nitrogen and the 

 other materials already in the soil, available to crops. Instead of wearing out soils, they 

 strengthen them. May not this difference be due, in part at least, to the fact that they supply 

 the other ingredients of plant-food that the guano and fish lack? 



Stable manure furnishes all the ingredients of plant -food. It is a complete fertilizer. 

 Farmers do not complain that it helps to exhaust their land. 



There are soils which, by applications of nitrogen and phosphoric acid, in the form of 

 guano, bone, or nitrogenous superphosphates, may be made to bear good crops year after 

 year. They supply, of themselves, the other materials needed. They have abundant stores of 

 magnesia and potash, and so on, and by weathering, tillage, and the action of the fertilizing 

 materials added, these are worked over from unavailable forms into those which the plant 

 can use. 



But such is not always the case. Among the worn-out soils of New England, there are 

 a great many which lack more than nitrogen, phosphoric acid, sulphuric acid, and lime. 



This is very strikingly illustrated in the elaborate experiments of Prof. F. H. Storer, at 

 the Bussey Institution, at Jamaica Plain, Mass. These were made upon what Prof. Storer 

 calls a very good representative of the light, leachy soils that overlie gravelly drift in New 

 England. In these experiments, which continued through a series of years, different crops 

 were raised with different manures, the same crop being grown with the same manure on the 

 same plot, year after year. Those raised with fertilizers containing nitrogen and phosphoric 

 acid only, showed very little good effect from the manuring, while the potash compounds 

 brought the most satisfactory returns. As Prof. Storer says, the crying want of this land 

 was for potash.&quot; 



Barnyard Manure- Farm manures, as a general rule, may be regarded as containing 

 all the essential elements of plant-food, hence, are complete fertilizers. In this respect 

 they differ from commercial fertilizers, any one of which contains but a portion of the 

 requisite elements appropriated by plants in their growth. Animal excrement was 

 formerly almost the only reliance of the farmer for replenishing his lands, he depending 

 mainly for the supply upon what was furnished by the barn-yard, the pig-sty, and the 

 sheep-fold; and even these manures were usually lessened in value by being left until 

 wanted for use, where their most valuable fertilizing elements would be leached out by the 

 rains and evaporated by the sun. 



The improvements in the system of agriculture during the last half or quarter of i 

 century, while they bring new aids to the farmer by the use of concentrated fertilizers of 



