AS MANURE IN A FRESH STATE. 1,95 



between the 10th and 20th of June; but as the small cotyledons of the 

 turnip-seed afford little to feed the young plant ; and as the soil, owing 

 to its extreme poverty, could not yield much nutriment, I thought it 

 necessary to place the fern a few days in a heap, to ferment sufficiently 

 to destroy life in it, and to produce an exudation of its juices ; and it 

 was then committed, in rows, to the soil, and the turnip-seed deposited, 

 with a drilling machine, over it. 



Some adjoining rows were manured with the black vegetable mould 

 obtained from the site of an old wood pile, mixed with the slender 

 branches of trees in every stage of decomposition, the quantity placed in 

 each row appearing to me to exceed, more than four times, the amount 

 of the vegetable mould, which the green fern, if equally decomposed, 

 would have yielded. The crop succeeded in both cases ; but the plants 

 upon the green fern grew with greatly more rapidity than the others, 

 and even than those which had been manured with the produce of my 

 fold and stable -yard, and were distinguishable, in the autumn, from the 

 plants in every other part of the field, by the deeper shade of their 

 foliage. 



I had made, in preceding years, many similar experiments with small 

 trees (particularly those of the mulberry when bearing fruit in pots), with 

 similar results : but I think it unnecessary to trespass on the time of the 

 Society by stating these experiments, conceiving those I have mentioned 

 to be sufficient to show that any given quantity of vegetable matter can 

 generally be employed, in its recent and organised state, with much more 

 advantage than when it has been decomposed, and no inconsiderable 

 part of its component parts has been dissipated and lost, during the 

 progress of the putrefactive fermentation. 



XXIIL ON FACILITATING THE EMISSION OF ROOTS FROM LAYERS. 



[Read before the HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY, February 4th> 1812.] 



IT is my custom, annually, to repeat every experiment that occurs to 

 me, from which I have reason to expect information either in opposition 

 to, or in favour of, the opinions I have advanced respecting the genera- 

 tion and motion of the sap in trees ; and one of these experiments 

 appearing to point out an improvement in the propagation of such trees by 

 layering, as do not readily emit roots by that process, I send the following 

 statement, under the hope that it may be acceptable to the Horticultural 

 Society. 



o2 



