30 AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY. 



pressed. Thus, for example, a single place, named Tomacomi, on 

 the coast of Yezo, furnishes yearly about 150 tubs of fish-oil and 

 nearly 7,000 Koku of fish-manure. This vile-smelling but very 

 effective fish-guano is used, among other things, for manuring tea- 

 plants. The refuse of silk-worm culture is also made useful as a 

 fertilizer. 



Another very valuable sort of manure consists in oil-cakes, or 

 Abura-kasu, which, with fish-manure also, is employed in hastening 

 the growth of young cotton and tobacco plants. They are obtained 

 from the seeds of the different oil-bearing plants, as Brassica^ 

 Sinapis, Perilla, Sesaimim and Gossypiuin, and have, naturally, very 

 unequal values as fertilizers. Abura-kasu, in general, signifies the 

 commonest and most valued, namely, the rape-seed cakes. 



Besides these oil-cakes, as further vegetable manures, boiled or 

 pounded beans, rape-straw, barley-straw, wheat-straw, chaff, and 

 other refuse, and especially green plants, are used. Green manure 

 is not, like clover and other plants in China, obtained by special 

 sowing, but is taken from uncultivated patches of ground. It is a 

 mixture of grass, weeds, undershrubs, and young branches, as they 

 grow on mountain-sides and in thin forests. Women and children 

 gather this material and take it to the fields in baskets, though, 

 where it grows higher and farther among the mountains, the work 

 is done by men with pack-horses. Like rape-straw, it is chiefly 

 used for manuring and strewing rice-fields, when the latter are 

 made ready to receive the young seedlings in early summer; and 

 it is totally decomposed in a few weeks by the action of water and 

 mud. 



On Amakusa and other southern islands, I observed coarse sea- 

 weeds spread as manure, especially Sargassiim. 



Of mineral substances, wood and straw ashes, especially those of 

 rice-straw (Wara) and rape-straw are used ; also the mud of the 

 irrigating canals, with which the seed-beds for young rice are 

 covered in spring. Ashes and mud are, in general, favourite fer- 

 tilizers for hastening the growth of young crops. 



The extensive use of lime has a greater interest for us. As 

 is well known, the French distinguish between amendenie^tt (soil- 

 improvement) and engrais (manuring). Quick-lime serves both 

 purposes. Chemistry teaches that, in close contact with clay, 

 silicates, and water, it frees the silicic acid combinations and makes 

 the silicic acids accessible to the plants, and that therefore a 

 heavy clay soil becomes looser and more fruitful through the 

 addition of slacked lime, quite apart from the direct worth of the 

 lime as plant-food in soil hitherto devoid of lime. 



In Germany we see lime thus used, for example in the valley 

 of the Sieg, in Saxony, and various other regions. But it is un- 

 likely that any European farmer, by his own observation and 

 experience, arrived so early at such practical results as the Japanese, 

 or has so long been used for manuring heavy clay soil. 



