FARM EXPERIMENTS AT LAKESIDE. 123 



little atoms and disintegrate the structure. We 

 must not mislead or be misled in this matter. If a 

 farmer has a quantity of raw bones which have 

 been picked up, it is probable they cannot be 

 ground in any mill within his reach, and he cannot 

 dissolve them in acid. His best plan is to dissolve 

 them by either packing in good wood ashes after 

 the method which has been often described, and 

 which I presume is well understood, or burn them 

 to whiteness, and then have them ground in a plas- 

 ter mill. Bones piled in a heap with wood, will 

 ignite and burn with great fierceness. The cal- 

 cined product is brittle and can easily be ground, 

 and the powder, dissolved in acio 1 , forms an excel- 

 lent superphosphate. 



It seems to be necessary to state again and again, 

 that in order to obtain from bones the full fertilizing 

 influence they are capable of affording, they must 

 be reduced to an impalpable powder, that it is a 

 waste to sow upon fields bones which are simply 

 crushed into fragments, so as to be seen readily by 

 the eye. In 1864, I sowed upon a field a bushel 

 of bone fragments, none of them larger than a pea 

 or bean, and in the summer of 1870, upon turning 

 over the field with the plough, they were brought 

 to the surface entirely unchanged. Ordinary soil 

 and atmospheric influences will not disintegrate and 

 render available, as plant food, bones in the whole 



