MANURES. 135 



trious husbandman, who had thus enriched both his wheat- 

 fields and his vineyards. 



The present age boasts loudly of its progress and improve- 

 ment over the past. How much improvement and advancement 

 have the farmers of this nineteenth century made, in the use of 

 barn-yard manure and the ordinary modes of composting, over 

 that in use by the Grecians and Romans two thousand years ago ? 

 The preparation of poudrettc from night soil was known long 

 ago to the Chinese. Ashes were used and preferred to barn- 

 yard manure long since by the Britons, as well as by the Ro- 

 mans. In the early part of the middle ages, calcareous sand 

 was used by the English farmers as a manure. Even sea sand 

 was employed as a fertilizer, in the counties of Devon and 

 Cornwall, for the improvement of their arable lands. Carbon- 

 ate of soda or of potash, we have seen from the history of the 

 past, has been used in steeping seeds and as a fertilizer; and 

 several kinds of saline substances and preparations have long 

 been used in Briton, both for preparing seeds and as fertili- 

 zers. An agricultural writer three hundred years ago made a 

 record that some farmers believed coleworts, a species of cab- 

 bage, grew best in salt ground ; and therefore they employed 

 salt as a manure, also saltpetre and ashes. A writer near the 

 close of the seventeenth century says, "Rains and dews, cold and 

 dry winters, with store of snow, I reckon equal to the richest 

 manures, impregnated as they are with celestial nitre ; and I 

 firmly believe that were saltpetre, I mean fictitious nitre, to be 

 obtained in plenty, we should need but little other compost to 

 meliorate our grounds." 



A compound of lime and common salt, it is said, was recom- 

 mended more than two hundred years ago by Glauber, a dis- 

 tinguished German chemist, in his Hints on Agriculture, as most 

 fit for dunging lands, and to be used instead of animal excre- 

 ments ; and the same preparation was described and commend- 

 ed towards the close of the seventeenth century by Christopher 

 Packe, as the cheapest of all mixtures for the enriching of poor 

 and barren land. 



Gypsum began to be used as a manure after the middle of 

 the last century ; so also did fish ; since when they have been 

 extensively employed. Guano, though universally used by the 



