160 MANURES. - 



to have eaten a good part of that, and rhade manure 

 of the rest. More probably it will be peat or swamp 

 mud, thrown up where you reclaimed swamp last 

 year or the year before, now cured of its sourness by 

 sun and rains, and ready for Tjse. It may be peat 

 which you have bought of your neighbor at 12^ cents 

 a load, because none such is found on your own farm ; 

 or it may be loam of a good quality, which you turned 

 up two years ago for this very purpose ; or road- 

 scrapings, which your men threw up in heaps at odd 

 spells last summer ; or vegetable mould, gathered into 

 piles along the border of the woods. Whatever it is, 

 we will call it a vegetable absorbent It is not UUe7\ Its 

 object is not to keep cattle warm in winter, but to ab- 

 sorb their urine, which is worth as much as the solid 

 excrements, or a little more, and to keep it from 

 running to loss. All the substances just mentioned 

 shall be called vegetable absorbents^ in the remaining 

 part of this work. They are supposed to contain de- 

 caying vegetable matter, some more and others less, 

 and therefore to be valuable in themselves as fertilizers, 

 but valuable, especially, as absorbents of rain-water 

 and urine, and fully adequate, if used abundantly, to 

 prevent the salts of manure from being washed away, 

 and its gases from taking wings. 



300. Before telling you precisely what to do with 

 these vegetable absorbents^ let me exhort you, as you 

 wish to live and thrive by farming, to have them 

 always at command, so that whenever your teams are 

 not otherwise employed, you may draw them in for 

 use. I wish also, l^efore going farther, to explain a 



