ON MANURES, &C, 35 



DR. A. NICHOLS'S STATEMENT. 



7"o the Committee of the Essex Agricultural Society , > 

 on Manures : $ 



Persuaded of the importance of the discoveries 

 made by Dr. Samuel L. Dana, of Lowell, and given 

 to the world through the medium of the reports of 

 Professor Hitchcock and Rev. H. Column, to the 

 Legislature of Massachusetts, concerning the food 

 ol vegetables, geine, and the abundance of it in peat 

 mud, in an insoluble state to be sure and in that state 

 not readily absorbed and digested by the roots of 

 cultivated vegetables, but rendered soluble and very 

 easily digestible by such plants by potash, wood ash- 

 es, or other alkalies, among which is ammonia, one of 

 the products of fermenting animal manures, I resolv- 

 ed last year to subject his theories to the test of ex- 

 periment the present season. Accordingly I direct- 

 ed a quantity of black peat mud, procured by ditch- 

 ing for the purpose of draining and reclaiming an 

 alder swamp, a part of which I had some years since 

 brought into a state highly productive of the cultiva- 

 ted grasses, to be thrown in heaps. During the win- 

 ter I also had collected in Salem, 282 bushels of un- 

 leached wood ashes at the cost of 12 1-2 cents per 

 bushel. These were sent up to my farm, a part to 

 be spread on my black soil grass lands, and a part to 

 be mixed with mud for my tillage land. Two hun- 

 dred bushels of these were spread on about six acres 

 of such grass land while it was covered with ice and 

 frozen hard enough to be carted over without cut- 

 ting it into ruts. These lands produced from one to 

 two tons of good merchantable hay to the acre, 



