

ENGLISH AGRICULTURE. 151 



or at Woburn after manuring with artificially produced salts 

 it may be of ammonia salts, or ammonia salts plus certain 

 other substances, but nevertheless of artificial salts, than 

 with repeated and constantly repeated dressings of farmyard 

 manure. With reference to these results, I cannot say that 

 they have shaken my faith in farmyard manure, because 

 there is a very great difference between consecutive corn 

 growing, coupled with consecutive dunging of the ground, 

 and the ordinary system of farming by rotation of crops. 

 When wheat or barley is taken year after year off the same 

 land, there is necessarily a long period between harvest and 

 the spring of the year, when the crop is again sown, during 

 which the ground is unoccupied, and during the whole of 

 that period nitrification is busy, and the materials which com- 

 pose the farmyard dung are subjected to decay, and to 

 washing through the soil, whereas in the case of ordinary 

 farms, where the stubble is at once ploughed up and planted 

 with rye, vetches, trifolium, or other fodder crops, or it may 

 be where you have a carpet of clover or rye grass succeeding 

 barley, there you have a different combination of circum- 

 stances nitrification proceeding under a network of roots 

 removing the nitrogenous matter as fast as formed, and 

 accumulating it in the surface layers of the soil for the 

 further use of the plants. That is a different state of things 

 altogether to that in which we have a repeated crop culti- 

 vated upon the same soil. Also it is scarcely just to farm- 

 yard manure that it should be exposed to the action of the 

 same crop year after year. A variety of crops introduces a 

 new element, and so far as practical observation goes in 

 ordinary farming, there is perhaps no substance which gives 

 such satisfactory results to us as good farmyard dung. I 

 think it worth while therefore to enlarge a little upon the 

 reasons why it is that farmyard dung should hold such a 

 strong position in the estimation of the British farmer. 



