THE CHOICE OF MANURES ^ 365 



means of wealth which agricultural chemistry was placing at their 

 command. But while drainage, in the main, helped only one class 

 of farmers, the benefits of manure were universal. The practice 

 of manuring is of immemorial antiquity. But it w&,s in the extended 

 choice of fertihsing substances, in the scientific analysis of their 

 composition and values, in their concentration and portabihty, and 

 in the greater range of time at which they could be profitably 

 appHed that a prodigious advance was made during the Victorian 

 era. 



For inland farmers in rural districts the choice of manures was 

 practically limited to the ashes of vegetable refuse which represented 

 the food drawai by the plant from the soil, " catch-cropping " with 

 leguminous crops, folding sheep, and farmyard manure. " Nothing 

 Hke muck " had become a proverb when there was practically 

 " nothing but muck " to be used. On the same poverty of fertihsing 

 resources were founded the severe restrictions against selling hay, 

 straw, and roots off farms. In another sense the proverb is true — 

 fortunately for the fertihty of the country. Rich both in organic 

 and inorganic substances, combining both nitrogen and minerals, 

 possessing for the loosening of clay lands a pecuhar value, farmyard 

 manuxeJs-ilie-xmlyL substance which contains in itself all the con- 

 stit uent elem ents ^ofjertility. Our predecessors thus commanded 

 the most valuable of fertihsing agencies, the most certain and the 

 least capricious. But in then' open unspouted, unguttered yards, 

 in their ignorance of the importance of the hquid elements, and with 

 their straw-fed stock, the manure was both wasted and impoverished. 

 Nor is it only in the quantity and quahty of dung, or in its collection 

 and treatment, that farmers have the advantage to-day. Formerly 

 distant fields suffered when no concentrated and portable fertihser 

 existed, and, valuable though dung is, its uses are not unhmited. In 

 the infancy, moreover, of agricultural science, men had Httle know- 

 ledge of the composition of soils, the necessities of plant hfe, or the 

 special demand that each crop makes on the land. It is in aU these 

 respects that modem resources are multiphed. The supplyjof con- 

 centrated portable manures, adaptedby their varied range to all 

 conditiQns~arthe"soil, capabie^of restoring those elements ofJertihty 

 which each particu lar crop _exhausts, and applicable at different 

 stages of plants life, is the greatest achievement of modern agri- 

 cultural science. 



It is to the great German chemist Li ebig that modern agriculture 



