I2O ColcoriFs System of 



agous to the term used about phosphoric acid, 

 and illustrate it as it may be applied to iron. 

 If you simply pulverize iron very fine, you can 

 so change its condition that you can set fire 

 to it with a match, and burn it up. So you 

 may commute bones so fine that they will 

 become available for plant food very soon after 

 being applied to the damp earth, and all plants 

 take their food in liquid form. The reader 

 may think that these statements should be 

 commuted, to make them available, so I will 

 state that, when commercial fertilizers were 

 in their infancy, I bought of this same J. A. 

 Tucker, before referred to, who was then 

 comparatively juvenile and the first superphos- 

 phate man I ever heard of. I took some of 

 his fresh ground and fleshy bones, ranging in 

 size from the point of a needle to a thumb- 

 nail, and applied it to a grape-vine in a sickly 

 condition vegetating in a small back yard in 

 the city, and raised the sickly, emaciated vine 

 to the top of a three-story building, training it 

 to the sunshine, where I raised quantities of 

 grapes upon it annually, the phosphates being 

 immediately and continuously available. 



I also visited the works of the same Mr. 

 Benjamin Randall before mentioned, and ex- 

 amined the various mills in use by his prede- 



