io8 PHOSPHATIC MANURES [chap. 



quoted : " England is robbing all other countries of 

 their fertility. Already in her eagerness for bones, 

 she has turned up the battlefields of Leipsic, and 

 Waterloo, and of the Crimea : already from the cata- 

 combs of Sicily she has carried away the skeletons of 

 many successive generations. Annually she removes 

 from the shores of other countries to her own the 

 manurial equivalent of three million and a half of men, 

 whom she takes from us the means of supporting, and 

 squanders down her sewers to the sea. Like a vampire 

 she hangs upon the neck of Europe, nay, of the whole 

 world, and sucks the heart blood from nations without 

 a thought of justice towards them, without a shadow of 

 lasting advantage to herself ! " 



For a time the importations fell off, but with the 

 growth of the artificial manure trade and the opening up 

 of India and South America as sources, the amounts 

 introduced increased enormously, though since the 

 discovery of basic slag and the cheapening of mineral 

 phosphates, they have been falling greatly again for 

 the last fifteen or twenty years. In 1906 the imports 

 amounted to 42,600 tons, the home production being 

 estimated at about 60,000 tons, so that they still form 

 a very important part of the fertiliser trade, even if they 

 no longer retain their old pre-eminence. 



Bones are but rarely used for manure in their raw 

 condition as they are received from the collectors ; in 

 nearly all cases they are put through one or more 

 steaming processes. The raw bone consists of a 

 mineral framework, amounting to 70 per cent, or 

 so of the dry bone and consisting in the main of 

 phosphate of lime, which, together with a little carbonate 

 of lime, is left behind when the bone is burnt, as in bone 

 ash. The whole of the mineral framework is permeated 

 by cartilage consisting of nitrogenous compounds — 



