114 . MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



MANURES. 



Special or Concentrated Fertilizers. 



ESSEX. 

 EssA\' BY Dr. James R. Nichols. 



Nothing more readily attracts the attention of farmers, or 

 conveys more palpable ideas of value, than hulk in maniirial 

 substances, and yet nothing is more deceptive or fallacious. A 

 huge bank of animal excrement under the eaves droppings of the 

 barn has indeed a positive value, but it does not consist in the 

 great mass of the material of which it is made up. Squeeze 

 out the water, remove the sand and chaff, and we can place all 

 the fertilizing elements of that heap in the smallest-sized dump- 

 cart. The high value of stable or barnyard manure is not 

 found in the eighty or ninety per cent, of water, silica, &c., 

 which it contains, but in the nitrogenous elements — the potash, 

 soda and phosphatic salts, which in amount occupy relatively a 

 most insignificant position. And I may say further, that the 

 excrementitious salts found in the manure heap have the high- 

 est positive value, as plant-food, of any substances with which 

 we are acquainted. They exist in a form ready to be again 

 taken up by plants and assimilated into the living organism. 

 They differ from the same class of agents found isolated in 

 the hands of the chemist, inasmuch as they have had conferred 

 upon them in their passage through vegetable and animal 

 structures a kind of vitalized capability, the nature of which 

 is imperfectly understood by chemists. 



But the deceptive nature of bulk in fertilizing agents is not 

 confined to barnyard manure. Leaves, peat, muck, chaff, &c., 

 need to be carefully examined in order to understand their 

 actual value to the farmer. I have been led during the pres- 

 ent autumn to make somewhat extended analyses of these 

 substances with the view of testing the correctness of some 

 published statements regarding them, and also to learn of how 

 much positive service they may .be to the farmer. A bushel 

 of well-pressed dry leaves as they fall from the trees in autumn 

 weighs about four pounds ; by further drying they part with a 



