THE FARMERS' CABINET, 



AND 



. AMERICAN HERD-BOOK, 



DEVOTED TO 



AGRICULTURE, HORTICULTURE, AND RURAL AND DOMESTIC AFFAIRS. 



" The Productions of the Eurth will always bo in proportion to tlie culture bestowed upon it." 



Vol. VI — No. 8. 



3d nio. (March,) 15th, 1842. 



[Whole No. ^G, 



KIMBER & SHARPLESS, 



PROPRIETORS AND PUBLISHERS, 



No. 50 North Fourth Street, 



PHILACELPHIA. 

 Price one dollar per year. — For conditions see last page. 



For the Farmers' Cabinet. 

 ; Magnesian Lime, No. 2. 



At page 276 of vol. 5 of the Farmers' Ca- 

 binet, in a short extract from the " General 

 Report of Scotland," it is slated that " it had 

 been long- known to farmers in the neighbour- 

 hood of Doncaster, England, that lime made 

 from a certain stone, and applied to land, often 

 injured the crops considerably. Mr. Tenant, 

 in making a set of experiments upon this pe- 

 culiar calcareous substance, found that it con- 

 tained magnesia, and on mixing some calcined 

 magnesia with soil, in which he sowed dif- 

 ferent seeds, he found that they either died 

 or vegetated in a very imperfect manner, and 

 the plants were never healthy; and with 

 great justice and ingenuity he referred the 

 bad effects of this peculiar limestone to the 

 magnesian earth it contained. Yet it is ad- 

 vantageously employed in small quantities, 

 seldom more than 25 or 30 bushels per acre." 



Mr. Tenant's account of his experiments 

 first appeared, we believe, in the Philosophi- 

 cal Transactions of England, and we know 

 not that it ever appeared in any other form. 

 It is certainly not in very general circulation. 

 We cannot say, therefore, how extensive, va- 

 ried and accurate the experiments may have 

 been. But it is from such vague, loose and 

 indefinite accounts as the above, that we are 

 called upon to swallow the whole doctrine 

 and all its consequences — head, horns and all, 

 without making a wry face, and that too in 

 opposition to a host of proofs of its utter fallacy, 

 derived from one of the most extensive and 

 ■iecisive experiments ever made in agricul- 

 ture. 



But leaving Mr. Tenant's account of the 

 Tiatter out of view for the present, let us ex- 

 imine that which the advocates of the doc- 

 rine it was intended to support have vouch- 

 iafed to give us. They tell us that he mixed I 

 ome calcined magnesia with the soil (but I 

 hey do not tell us how much), and found j 

 hat seeds sown in it either did not come up I 



Cab.— Vol. VI No. 8. 



I 



at all, or if they did, did not grow vigorously. 

 Well, we grant that they did not. What 

 then] Does it necessarily follow that mag- 

 nesia is destructive to vegetation 1 Suppose 

 he had mixed pure lime, or even pounded 

 chalk, with his earth, everybody knows, or 

 may easily ascertain, that if an undue propor- 

 tion of either were used, his plants would 

 have withered and died, the same as they did 

 in the magnesian mixture. Would it not 

 then be just as philosophical to assert that 

 lime was in the latter case injurious to vege- 

 tation, as that magnesia was in the former 1 



Here then appears but a single unvaried 

 experiment, with an attempt to build a very 

 important theory on the narrowest possible 

 foundation of fact. And never has a hastily- 

 formed or unsound theory been more signally 

 overthrown by subsequent experience. In- 

 stead, therefore, of saying that it was just 

 and ingenuous to refer the injurious efT'ects of 

 the lime in question to magnesia, we should 

 rather say that it was a hasty and unjust con- 

 clusion, and would never have been put forth 

 by one acting under correct views of the re- 

 quirements of the inductive philosophy. 



But it is not against the possibility of the 

 injurious nature of the Doncaster limestone, 

 or of the correctness of Mr. Tenant's experi- 

 ments, for we care not a straw whether they 

 are correct or otherwise ; but it is against the 

 broad doctrine of the deleterious nature of 

 magnesian lime in all its forms, attempted to 

 be deduced from them, that we contend. Ft 

 is against the senseless repetition of this doc- 

 trine, unsupported as it is by any subsequent 

 experiments, by every unfledged agricultural 

 essayist, or every enthusiastic builder of plau- 

 sible theories, that we enter our protest. Ag- 

 ricultural publications are extending in circu- 

 lation every day, and are beginning to be 

 looked up to as sources of correct information. 

 It is of importance, therefore, that theories 

 diametrically opposed to every day's experi- 

 ence should not be reiterated in them again 

 and again, without attempts being made to 

 show their utter fallacy. Lime, in some 

 parts of our country, is a very costly article 

 for manure, owing to the expense of carriage. 

 A young farmer in one of these has a poor 

 exhausted farm. He sees in the Cabinet and 

 other publications lime highly recommended 

 as a manure, but he also sees essays profess- 



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