AGRICULTURAL CHEMISTRY AND GEOLOGY. 157 



improvement? "Were the nets and other appliances of the fisherman, which were the same 

 in kind as we read of 1800 years ago, although possibly improved in detail, were they the 

 last and supreme effort of ingenuity and invention? Was nothing to be accomplished in 

 the way of extracting from the waters of the sea a greater supply of its teeming population? 

 Surely it was open to improvement. But it seemed to him that the calculations and argu- 

 ments on this question were not usually quite to the point. Everybody talked of " refuse" 

 fish, that is to say, the offal .of edible fish, and the fish accidentally caught which were unfit 

 for the food market; and it was said by those who certainly well understood the subject, "a 

 boat with so many men will take in the day such-and-such a quantity of fish, of which the 

 uneatable fish will amount to so-and-so, and that quantity will not keep a factory in work or 

 create a manufacture of any national importance." But he said that fishing for manure 

 must be the primary, and the capture of edible fish the secondary, consideration, if they 

 desired to raise this into a great national question. And we had yet to learn what would be 

 the result of a day's labor of a given number of men, when their attention was directed, not 

 as now,' to the comparatively rare and valuable fish, but to those which hitherto they had 

 despised and avoided. In his opinion, the statistics hitherto put forward were worth nothing, 

 because they were not derived from this point of view. In the search after fish for the 

 manufacture of manure, the proverb that "All is fish that comes to the net" ought to be 

 varied to "All is fish that the net can reach." 



Prof. Way concluded his lecture, as he had begun it, by urging the necessity of encourag- 

 ing every attempt to obtain new sources of raw material for the manufacture of manure. 

 Without this, a term would be reached when the competition for manufactured manures, 

 with an insufficient supply, would raise the price up to the extreme limits at which their use 

 would be remunerative; for a time the deficiency would be met by adulteration and inferiority 

 of the article ; and this, together with the scramble to get manure, would soon wean farmers 

 from their partiality to artificial manures. Then, indeed, the progress of agriculture in this 

 country, at all events in the use of artificial manures, would receive a serious check. lie 

 did not wish to draw a gloomy picture, but such a state of things must inevitably result, if 

 the increasing demand for manures were not met with some new and abundant supply of the 

 raw material. Farmer's Magazine. 



Sewage Manure. 



THOMAS WICKSTEED, of Leicester, England, has secured a patent for making sewage 

 manure, by mixing charcoal reduced to fine powder with milk of lime, of the thickness of 

 cream, and then causing this mixture to flow ihto a stream of the sewage water by means 

 of pumps. 



A Fact in Manuring. 



A PERSON carrying some orange-trees from China to the Prince of Wales' Island, when 

 they had many hundred fruit on them, expected a good crop the next year, but was utterly 

 disappointed ; they produced but few. A Chinese, settled in the island, told him if he would 

 have his trees bear, he must treat them as they were accustomed to in China; and he 

 described the following process for providing manure: "A cistern, so lined and covered as 

 to be air-tight, is half-filled with animal matter ; and to prevent bursting from the genera- 

 tion of air, a valve is fixed which gives way with some difficulty, and lets no more gas escape 

 than is necessary : the longer the manure is kept the better, till four years, when it is in 

 perfection; it is taken out in the consistence nearly of jelly, and a small portion buried at 

 the root of every orange-tree, the result being an uncommonly great yield." A person hear- 

 ing of the above fact, and wishing to abridge the term of the preparation, thought that boil- 

 ing animals to a jelly might have a similar if not so strong an effect. Accordingly, he boiled 

 several puppies, and applied the jelly to the roots of a sterile fig-tree: the benefit was very 

 great, the tree from that time for several years bearing in profusion. Hints of this kind are 

 well worth preserving, for though a farmer may neither have the apparatus of the Chinese, 



