THE CHOICE OF MANURES 366 



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 was in the extended 

 choice of fertilising substances, in the scientific analysis of their 

 composition and values, in their concentration and portability, and 

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

 applied 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 drawn by the plant from the soil, " catch-cropping " with 

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

 like muck " had become a proverb when there was practically 

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

 resources were founded the severe restrictions against selling hay, 

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

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

 and inorganic substances, combining both nitrogen and minerals, 

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

 manure is the only substance which contains in itself all the con- 

 stituent elements of fertility. Our predecessors thus commanded 

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

 least capricious. But in their open unspouted, unguttered yards, 

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

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

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

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

 distant fields suffered when no concentrated and portable fertiliser 

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

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

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

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

 respects that modern resources are multiplied. The supply of con- 

 centrated portable manures, adapted by their varied range to all 

 conditions of the soil, capable of restoring those elements of fertility 

 which each particular crop exhausts, and applicable at different 

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

 cultural science. 



It is to the great German chemist Liebig that modern agriculture 



