APPENDIX. 



No. I. — Dr. Nichols's Statements, from the Essex 

 County Agricultural transactions , 1839-40. 



To the Committee to whom teas referred the communication of 

 Andrew Nichols, on the subject of Compost Manures, «^c. 



Gentlemen : — Persuaded of the importance of the discover- 

 ies made by Dr. Samuel L. Dana, of Lowell, and given to the 

 world through the medium of the reports of Professor Hitch- 

 cock and Rev. H. Colman, to the Legislature of Massachusetts, 

 concerning the food of vegetables, geine,and the abundance of 

 it in peat mud, in an insoluble state to be sure, and in that 

 state not readily absorbed and digested by the roots of culti- 

 vated vegetables, but rendered soluble and very easily digest- 

 ible by such plants by potash, wood ashes, or other alkalies, 

 among which is ammonia, one of the products of fermenting 

 animal manures, I resolved last year to subject his theories to 

 the test of experiment the present season. Accordingly I di- 

 rected a quantity of black peat mud, procured by ditching for 

 the purpose of draining and reclaiming an alder swamp, a part 

 of which I had some years since brought into a state highly 

 productive of the cultivated grasses, to be thrown in heaps. 

 During the winter I also had collected in Salem, 282 bushels 

 of unleached wood ashes, at the cost of 12 1-2 cents per bush- 

 el. These were sent up to my farm, a part to spread on my 

 black soil grass lands, and a part to be mixed with mud for my 

 tillage land. Two hundred bushels of these were spread on 

 about six acres of such grass land, while it was covered with 

 ice and frozen hard enough to be carted over without cutting 

 it into ruts. These lands produced from one to two tons of 



