324 Extracts from the Journals. [Oct., 



ino- nature present themselves relative to the growth of plants 

 on nitrous (septic) soils. In general, vegetables growing in such 

 soils, are remarked to become very large, and to get ripe early. 

 And as they are soon ripe, they are soon rotten. Tobacco, in 

 such situations, is very luxuriant, and quickly matures, but is 

 very apt to rot on its passage from America to Europe; and too 

 much seption in it seems to give it the bad quality of going out 

 very readily after it is set on fire for smoking. Potatoes grow 

 rapidly and large, but will keep only for a short time; sugar 

 canes grow very rank, and are soon fit for cropping, but must be 

 manufactured speedily, or they spoil, and even with the earliest 

 care and best attention, afford, under such circumstances, sugar 

 and molasses of a quality below middling. (Stubbs. 3 Low- 

 thorp's Abridgement, p. 554.) Cabbages, for the same cause, 

 ripen too soon, corrupt in the head, and last not long enough for 

 winter use. 



What Pliny relates on the cultivation of the Helvanic vine, 

 (Nat. Hist. lib. xvi. de gener. Vitium,) confirms the same princi- 

 ple. " There is no vine," says he " which is less accommodated 

 to the soil of Italy; the grape which it bears is clear, small and 

 very apt to rot; and the wine it affords will not last longer than 

 a year; but thee is no plant that thrives better in poor land." 



If these ideas are just, then the d cay of such vegetable sub- 

 stances ought to be attended, under certain circumstances, with 

 the production of septic or pestilential fluids. This too is the 

 fact. Cabbages, putrefying in a cellar, have been known to ren- 

 der a house unhealthy. Corrupted coffee has been charged with 

 emitting pestilential effluvia enough to desolate a neighborhood. 

 The like may happen from rotten Jtaa', henif, potatoes, onions, and 

 in short, all other plants \vhich have dejived septon, or the prin- 

 ciple of putridity, from the soil in which they grew. It is pro- 

 bable, that rotten wheat contributed, with other causes, to ren- 

 der the vicinity of a certain store in New York, during the pes- 

 tilence of 1795, peculiarly unwholesome. The dispute, whether 

 pestilential effluvia proceed from animal or vegetable putrefac- 

 tion, seems thus reduced to its proper principle. When vege- 

 tables, containing septon, go into putrefactive decay, mischiev- 

 ous gasses may exhale from them, having the qualities of animal 

 productions. When this is not the case, collections of putre- 

 scent vegetable matter, as in peat mosses and bogs of turf, emit 

 no particularly offensive miasma to vitiate the surrounding air; 

 but, on the contrary, the water draining from such places is often 

 potable and good. 



3. There now occurs an obvious explanation of one of the ope- 

 rations of lime as a manure, when mingled with dung and soil. 

 The common opinion has been, that it promoted the putrefactive 



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