132 THE POSSIBILITIES 



way. The soil can be improved by hand, but 

 it need not be made by hand. Any soil, of any 

 desired composition, can be made by machinery. 

 We already have manufactures of manure, 

 engines for pulverising the phosphorites, and 

 even the granites of the Vosges ; and we shall 

 see manufactures of loam as soon as there is a 

 demand for them. 



It is obvious that at present, when fraud and 

 adulteration are exercised on such an immense 

 scale in the manufacture of artificial manure, 

 and the manufacture of manure is considered 

 as a chemical process, while it ought to be 

 considered as a physiological one, the gardener 

 prefers to spend an unimaginable amount of 

 labour rather than risk his crop by the use of a 

 pompously labelled and unworthy drug. But 

 that is a social obstacle which depends upon a 

 want of knowledge and a bad social organisa- 

 tion, not upon physical causes.* 



* Already it is partly removed in France and Belgium, owing 

 to the public laboratories where analyses of seeds and manure 

 are made free. The falsifications discovered by these labora- 

 tories exceed all that could have been imagined. Manures, 

 containing only one-fifth part of the nutritious elements they 

 were supposed to contain, were found to be quite common ; 

 while manures containing injurious matters, and no nutritious 

 parts whatever, were not unfrequently supplied by firms of 

 " respectable " repute. With seeds, things stand even worse. 

 Samples of grass seeds which contained 20 per cent, of unjurious 

 grasses, or 20 per cent, of grains of sand, so coloured as to 

 deceive the buyer, or even 10 per cent, of a deadly poisonous 

 grass, passed through the Ghent laboratory. 



