Muck and Fresh Stable Manure. 179 



I conceive it must have resulted from a deficiency of 

 crops admitting of cultivation while growing ; for, unless 

 we admit of equivocal generation, we must suppose, 

 that when the seed vegetates, and the young plant is de- 

 stroyed by the cultivation of the crop, all danger from 

 that quarter is at an end. The farmer, who composted, 

 exposed his seed to vegetate on a small scale, where in a 

 short time he could destroy those that had vegetated, and 

 expose a fresh parcel ; from that cause he might succeed, 

 under the same course that the other failed : he might 

 have succeeded equally well, by introducing more fallow 

 crops, and had a year's advance and increase in crop, to 

 have balanced the account of labour. I very much 

 doubt whether the vegetative power of weed- seeds is de- 

 stroyed by fermentation of a muck heap, unless it pro- 

 ceeds to height amounting almost to actual combustion ; 

 for the embryo principle of life resists the efforts of de- 

 composition, in most seeds, that contain but a small 

 quantity of farinaceous matter. Most weed- seeds are of 

 this description. In many, the vegetative power is as- 

 sisted. 



That fermentation of muck in a heap must be produc- 

 tive of great loss, every observer of nature, in her mode 

 of preparing food for plants, might have supposed ; eve- 

 ry farmer might have adopted the same assumption, from 

 the smell of his muck heap : but it is science, by teach- 



cum, Vol. V. p. 104. The successful farmer prospered by change 

 of crops, and invariably composting and rotting his dung. Smut 

 was uniformly the chief destroyer of his predecessor's crops ; — 

 of wheat particularly: but it never revisited the fields manured 

 with composted dung, after having been cleansed by tares, vetches, 

 and other fallow crops. R. P. 



