COMPOST MXXUUES. 53 



in plants. In composting manures, the aim of him who engages in 

 it, is, or should be, to provide food for plants by furnishing them with 

 carbon and ammonia, materials found in great abundance in the de- 

 composition of both vegetable and animal matter. 



The food of man and his domestic animals depends, chiefly, both 

 as to quantity, and quality, upon his skill and industry, as manifested 

 in his cooperation with Nature in the production of such vegetables 

 as are needed for growth and nutrition in the animal kingdom, such 

 as are either immediately, or mediately dependent thereon. 



It is a law of Nature, that the higher the grade of the animal and 

 the more complicated its organism, the greater the necessity of a cor- 

 responding degree of food. Man is the noblest creature that God 

 has made on the earth, and, consequently, has the most complicated 

 and highly wrought organization of animated nature. Hov,% or upon 

 what shall man subsist ? What does the best economy of his system 

 require ? A critical chemical analysis of his body, fed and nourished 

 under the direction of knowledge reflected upon the subject by the 

 light of physiology, will show its composition, and, therefore, demon- 

 strate what elements the soil needs to produce bodily nutrition. 

 Those elements will be found most important, as fertilizers of the 

 soil, that enter most largely into the growth and maintenance of the 

 human body. Man, in his present state, is both a herbivorous and 

 carnivorous animal, being composed organically of all those elements 

 that enter into the various organisms upon which he has subsisted, 

 and still subsists. 



The manures most common, are animal, green crops, peat, muck, 

 mud, poudrette, bones, guano, fish and animals, refuse of factories, — 

 wool, soot, ashes, lime, marl, phosphate, superphosphate, gypsum, 

 salt, and other specifics and compounds, too numerous to mention. 



Composting consists of mixing the different manurial substances — 

 or, in other words, of converting the animal or stable manures into 

 compost, by mixing them with some or all of the following, to wit, 

 loam, peat, muck, pond-mud, cleanings of drains, wash of roads, 

 leached ashes, using sandy loam, or marly clay, according to the 

 nature of the soil where the compost is to be used. Into your com- 

 post heap, throw weeds before the seeds form, straw, litter, animal 

 excretions, night-soil, the urine of the stables and all elsewhere that 

 can be saved, the wash from sink-drain, the suds of a washing-day, 

 and every thing else whose decomposition and fermentation furnishes 



