1840.] SENATE— No. 36. 183 



Scotland and the islands of Jersey and Guernsey. Whether it can be 

 purchased at a rate which will warrant a farmer here in applying it, can 

 bo determined only by trial, and the current price of the article at the 

 time. I believe the ordinary article may often be purchased at a low 

 rate ; and I hope the experiment will be made. It may certainly be 

 safe on a small scale. 



Of the use of sea-weeds in a crude state, I shall treat fully hereafter. 



"Leached ashes are found to succeed best on dry loamy lands, or 

 loam mixed with sand. It is considered the cheapest manure that can 

 be applied. Ten loads of this manure on poor land will produce, or- 

 dinarily twenty-five bushels of wheat. The land is then left in a con- 

 dition for yielding a crop of hay. No manure continues so long in 

 the ground as ashes." — Ncio York Agrl. Snc. Trans. 1792. 



On the use of ashes as a manure, I beg leave to refer to the very in- 

 structive letters of Dr. S. L. Dana, in the appendix to the second re- 

 port of the Agriculture of Massachusetts, p. 157. 



A. Nichols' statement to the Committee of the Essex Agricultural So- 

 ciety on manures : 



Persuaded of the importance of the discoveries made by Dr. Sam- 

 uel L. Dana, of Lowell, and given to the world through the mediuni 

 of the reports of Professor Hitchcock and Rev. H. Colman, to the 

 Legislature of Massachusetts, concerning the food of 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 digesti- 

 ble by such plants by potash, wood ashes, or other alkalies, among 

 which is ammonia, one of the products of fermenting animal manures, 

 I resolved last year to subject his theories to the test of experiment the 

 present season. Accordingly I directed a quantity of black peat mud, 

 procured by ditching 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 cultivated grasses, to be thrown in heaps. 

 During the winter, I also had collected in Salem, 282 bushels of un- 

 leaclied wood ashes at the cost of 12^ cents per bushel. These were 

 sent up to ray 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 hundred 

 bushels of these were spread on about six acres of such grass land 



