136 THE YEAR-BOOK OF AGRICULTURE. 



purposes, while the weekly supply of 6000 or 7000 bullocks, 40,000 sheep, and all the other 

 vast solid and fluid consumables of the metropolis, from tea to turtle, will be floating down 

 the sewers unheeded and unsolicited. 



This cruel neglect can only arise from a disbelief of the value of such manure, or from a 

 doubt of the possibility of applying it economically. I purpose, therefore, this evening, to 

 go into statistical details with a view to ventilate the question, and to prove how easily such 

 an operation may be successfully carried out with individual and general benefits. Water 

 alone is manure ; who can doubt this ? Look to the costly water-meadows in various parts 

 of the kingdom ; and what farmer who has a water-meadow does not appreciate its great 

 value to him as producing early, late, and most abundant vegetation ? My own experience, 

 with two miles of pipes on my farm of one hundred and seventy acres, has proved that fluid 

 applications of manure are far the most profitable, and that their influence is quite as im- 

 portant and advantageous to cereal as to other crops. In proof of this I have threshed some 

 fields of wheat, producing six quarters per imperial acre;* oats, thirteen quarters, and bar- 

 ley, eight quarters, which latter is one quarter more than I estimated in my balance-sheet. 

 Now, such productions as these on a naturally wretched soil prove more than volumes of 

 argument, and I have no hesitation in saying that, had my neighbors to pay 2 per acre 

 annually in interest for improvements over and above their present rent to obtain similar 

 results, they would be considerable gainers. If it answers my purpose to lay down pipes, 

 erect an engine, make tanks, erect pumps, and so on, for the mere purpose of applying the 

 manure made on my farm in a fluid state, with a large supply of water from my spring, 

 surely it must equally and more certainly pay a farmer to receive back his corn, bullocks, 

 sheep, and other productions, after they are done with, at a very much smaller cost ; for their 

 very essence will return to him, accompanied by all the good things that metropolitan luxury 

 can command from every foreign part. If we go into a statistical inquiry of the weekly sup- 

 ply of London in tea, coffee, and sugar; wine, spirits, and beer; fish, flesh, and fowl, (foreign 

 and British;) the tons of soap, and the thousand-and-one refuses of our manufactories, gas- 

 works, &c., one becomes amazed at the fructifying power involved in such a consideration. 

 The alkaline and grauited solutions of our pavements by trituration and abrasion, the smuts 

 from our smoke, have all a considerable value. 



The mere wear and tear of shoe-leather has its value, as it grinds down the pavement into 

 hollows. I apprehend that the daily cost of feeding each individual in this metropolis, taking 

 the average of rich and poor, young and old, would not be less than ten-pence per day, or 

 thirty-seven and a half millions sterling per annum. Now, in parts of Lincolnshire it is the 

 custom to value the manure at half the cost of the oil-cake consumed. On this principle, 

 which appears to be a sound one, the agricultural value of the manure from thi!S^iirty-seven 

 and a hal millions of food ought to be something very considerable, to say nothing 

 food consumed by the animals of the metropolis. The rubbing, washing, and agitating which 

 the solid excrement receives in passing through miles of tortuous sewers, cause it to be dis- 

 solved and pass away in a fluid state, which we may any day prove by an examination of the 

 sewers' mouths at low-water. I think farmers cannot be aware that all the solid and liquid 

 manure of men and animals is liquifiable by solution or suspension, and can be applied in a 

 shower, sinking deeply into the subsoil of drained land. Perhaps I may be here permitted 

 to explain why I consider this mode of application far superior to the solid form. If you 

 make a transverse cut or opening in the soil, you will find that the British agricultural pie- 

 crust is only five to eight inches thick. The slips and railway cuttings plainly reveal this 

 humiliating fact. Below this thin crust we see a primitive soil, bearing most unmistakable 

 evidence of antiquity and unalterability. The dark shades of the cultivated and manured 

 surface have not been communicated to the pale subsoil ; and we have evident proof that 

 solid manure plowed in, in the ordinary way, exercises little influence on the subsoil. Nor 

 can this be wondered at, when the plow sole has been polishing and solidifying the floor at 

 the same depth for the last few centuries. Now, when I apply liquified manure, (which 



* The "quarter" of English agriculturists is eight buskds; so that the yield of wheat was forty-eight bushels per 

 imperial acre of four rods, each forty-six perches or rods. 



