MANURES. 85 



such as night soil, or poultry manure which has been wet so as 

 to have lost its heating power. When it can be bought at low 

 prices I would recommend that experiments be made with it as 

 a fertilizer. 



I think if bone meal is to be applied broad-cast, it would 

 pay to mix it with an equal bulk of bran, and wet it with lye 

 from the manure heap, and as soon as it is thoroughly hot mix 

 again with an equal bulk of rich sifted mold, with a sprinkle 

 of plaster, and turn it every day till cool. I recommend this 

 for the reason that I think the fermentation produced by the 

 bran would partly decompose the bone and make it immediately 

 available to the wheat plant, which, as the season of growth in 

 the fall is short, is a matter of great importance. My expe- 

 rience with bone meal on the wheat crop has been that I could 

 see no effect from it until the following spring, and if only the 

 bran in the mixture was immediately available, it would be a 

 decided advantage, but if in addition the fermentation rendered 

 a portion of the plant food in the bone meal at once available 

 to the plant, it would be a still greater advantage. 



Commercial Manures. Under this head we include 

 ground bone, super-phosphate, guano, poudrette, dried blood, 

 rock-phosphate, plaster, and many other substances which are 

 sold in the market as fertilizers. While their use is general in 

 many parts of the East and South, it is but recently that they 

 have been introduced in the Mississippi Valley, and there is 

 much misapprehension among farmers in regard to them. Many 

 regard them as stimulants only, which, while they will enable the 

 farmer to reap larger crops for a while, will result in the final 

 exhaustion of the soil. Others look upon them as a substitute 

 for stable manure, and think that by their use they can escape 

 much of the dirty, disagreeable work of handling barn-yard ma- 

 nure. Both these ideas are incorrect. Most commercial fertili- 

 zers furnish plant food, and cause an increase of crops in the 

 same way that stable manure does, the difference being that 

 they do not, like stable manure, furnish all the constituents of 

 the plant, and so by the continued and exclusive use of a fertil- 

 izer that is deficient in some elements of plant food, heavy 



