Allcfi's Treatise on the G?ape. 79 



the practice of burying carrion has been an entire failure 

 among English cultivators, and the quotations seem only 

 to be made, in order to denounce them as "strange state- 

 ments," '-impossibilities," "wonderful stories, &c." (p. 226.) 



We should occupy several pages if we undertook to exam- 

 ine all the arguments which Mr. Allen adduces in favor of 

 his plan of using dead carcasses. It wonld not greatly interest 

 the cultivator if we did, as they have been denounced by all 

 French writers upon the vine ; and, with one or two excep- 

 tions, by the most eminent grape-growers in England ; 

 the grapes, from vines growing in well made borders of 

 loam and manure, have far excelled all others there, as well 

 as in our own country. 



Let us be understood. We did, and still do, consider it 

 a kind of horticultural quackery, to recommend such a 

 mass of substances, in the formation of a grape border. Mr. 

 Allen tells us that he had a border made of good stable ma- 

 nure, leaves, cow manure, loam and bones, in which the 

 grapes did not grow, (we do not wonder at it,) and that 

 last spring, he enlarged it and added "strong manure, many 

 whole bones, tv/enty bushels of ground ones, one hundred 

 baskets of charcoal screenings, and as much old mortar and 

 brickbats, with some considerable wood ashes mixed with 

 them." The vines, he states, are now doing well, but the 

 grapes were small, and well colored. If, to such a hete- 

 rogeneous mass as this, carcasses of fat hogs, dogs and 

 horses, old rags, chips, cider, old shoes, hair, feathers, blood, 

 fish, soot, lime, oyster shells, &c., are added, all of which are 

 recommended by some authors whom Mr. Allen quotes, is 

 the term quackery anything more than it fully merits? This, 

 then, was our object ; that gentlemen about to build graper- 

 ies should fully understand, that though a mixture of all, or 

 of any portion of these substances, might possibly make a 

 border in which grapes could be produced, the simple materi- 

 als which are always at hand, or easily to be got, such as 

 loam, manure, and ground bones, would be far superior, and 

 give more delicious fruit, and without turning the garden into 

 a noisome and pestilential manure yard. The whole cause 

 of the entire failure of Mr. Hoare's system of grape cultiva- 

 tion, as it has been called, was, that his compost was wholly 

 destitute of loam. 



