MODERN" HIGH FARMING. 



51 



Such manures as we are able to gather up in and about our farms, 

 from all sources, may consequently be considered as the mere excess 

 taken from the soil by the crops gathered in, and would certainly 

 not suffice of themselves to stay the already marked impoverishment 

 and eventual exhaustion which must naturally be the effect of such 

 a comprehensible cause. 



We may, therefore, consider the employment of chemical and artifi- 

 cial fertilizing matters, as not one whit less necessary in places where 

 an abundance of offal appears to exist, than it is in other circumstan- 

 ces where there is very little or none at all, and the liberal employ- 

 ment, judicious selection and economical purchase or manufacture 

 of sound manurial materials is the fundamental condition of suc- 

 cessful high farming. 



We must consider it a matter of very third rate, if of any impor- 

 tance to us, whether a manure is vegetable, animal, mineral, natural 

 or artificial, having merely to assure ourselves by chemical analysis 

 that it contains the needful elements, and that by its employment we 

 can increase our crops and enhance our profits. 



The value of stable dung must not be estimated upon its actual 

 richness in ammonia or phosphoric acid within a short period of its 

 production, but must be calculated on its wonderful physical and 

 chemical action on the elements of the soil and the air, and upon its 

 merits as a vehicle or conductor into which completing quantities 

 of outside substances can be introduced, decomposed, and rapidly 

 made available. 



The composition of its different constituents may here be set 

 forth in the. following order : 



Analysis of various kinds of Stable Urine. 



