166 MANURE. 



Bone phosphate of lime, . . . . . 3.46 

 Earthy matters, 24.82 . 



100.00 



209. It is evident, therefore, that the value of poudrette 

 depends on the skill and honesty of the manufacturer. But 

 allowing these to be what they should be, no consumer of 

 poudrette will think himself wronged, if he discovers ground 

 peat in the article ; and allowing this, and the plaster, or 

 other salts added, and water to compose one-half the weight 

 of this manure, the farmer buys, in every hundred pounds 

 of poudrette, 200 pounds of the best human excrement, and 

 in a form not only portable, but perfectly inoffensive. The 

 value of good poudrette, depending on its ammonia, is, com- 

 pared with cow-dung, as 4 to 1, calculated on the average of 

 its nitrogen, cow-dung being 1. 



Paris is the birth-place of poudrette, as well as of fashion. 

 Poudrette is one of the French fashions founded on good 

 taste. Rude in its first manufacture, like a French dish, it 

 has been improved by science, and its manufacture has 

 attracted the attention of the most eminent chemists, who 

 have conferred on this important interest the highest benefit. 

 One is astonished at the vastness of the works devoted to 

 the preparation of poudrette, at the forest of Bondy, and at 

 Montfaucon. There arrive daily at this establishment, six 

 hundred cubic yards of night-soil. This quantity affords one 

 hundred cubic yards of poudrette after undergoing the vari- 

 ous processes in the immense vats of reception and subsi- 

 dence. The liquids, and of course a large portion of the 

 salts, were formerly allowed to run into the Seine. But 

 even with this waste, the simply air-dried poudrette was 

 worth to the farmer and gardener, $1.62 per cwt., contain- 

 ing, on the average, l.G per cent, of nitrogen in the ordinary 



