286 History of the English Landed Interest. 



the Earth, a Salt that causes its Fertility ; and this Salt is its 

 only and true Treasure. "What it loses of this Salt, by the 

 Production of Plants, must be made good. For properly 

 speaking, 'tis only its Salt that diminishes." ^ This same 

 author recommends, therefore, the application of all varieties 

 of stuffs, linen, flesh, skins, bones, horses' hoofs, dirt, urine, 

 excrements, wood of trees, their fruits, leaves, ashes, and all 

 sorts of seeds, which last specific it is hoped the practical far- 

 mer who loved not weeds would have been too wise to adopt. 

 By the application of such waste products of human industry, 

 De la Quintaine, and Bradley after him, imagined that " the 

 Earth, to use the Term of Philosophers, becomes impregnated 

 with ' nitrous Salt,' which is the Salt of Fruitfulness." Bradley 

 tlierefore recommended the farmer to collect together all the 

 old rubbish upon which he could lay hands. The bones were 

 to be broken, the other substances cut in pieces, and all sepa- 

 rated out according to their degree of softness into three casks, 

 and saturated with rain-water for terms varying from four to 

 eight days, according to their supposed solubility. The solid 

 matter was then to be thrown away, and the impregnated rain- 

 water, supposed to contain the nitrous salt, to be retained for 

 use. If the enthusiast Bradley could have realised all the 

 precious manurial compounds of calcium and phosphorus he 

 was thus wasting only for the sake of retaining a weak solution 

 possessing alkaline attributes, he would have used the solid 

 refuse and thrown away the liquid. Had the analytical 

 chemist learned from the husbandman the wonderful fertilising 

 results obtained by dissolving some of Bradley's bone rubbish 

 in sulphuric acid, the supposed miraculous properties of nitrous 

 salt would have had to cede their importance as manures in 

 favour of superphosphate of lime. Even though Bradley, in 

 describing a solution of saltpetre as a good source of the 

 " nitrous salt," had stumbled on to one of the nitrates, he was 

 very far from recognising its importance as a vehicle by which 

 nitrogen could be placed in a form which could be assimilated 

 by plant life. His suggestion that hoofs possessed fertilising 



* Treatise of Agriculture, Part II. ch. xxii. 



