No. 129.] -269 



carriage. This article, as manure, would be profitable to such 

 farms as require the addition of this phosphate, at seventy cents 

 a bushel. There is but one large mine of it known in Europe, 

 and that is in Estremadura, in Spain. That phosphorite is veiy 

 white. A few tons of it have been sold at fifty pounds sterling 

 a ton. There is no water carriage for it. In Hungary, in some 

 places, it is found encrusting the surface of the ground annually. 

 In England the coprolite is found in considerable quantities in 

 green sand. This coprolite is an excrement of the antediluvian 

 Saurians — the monster lizards of that early period. Phosphorus 

 is extracted from these coprolites for use in fire works. 



Chairman. — Phosphate of lime is one of the most important 

 of the special manures ; it is found more or less in all plants and 

 especially the useful ones. This shows that it is generally their 

 food and is necessary to their vigorous growth and fall develop- 

 ment. Some of them, it is said, will not mature perfectly with- 

 out it, and a considerable portion of it too ; most of the cereals 

 or grain plants contain it ; wheat a good deal of it ; Indian corn, 

 oats, etc. All the nutritious grasses contain it. It is the bone 

 forming element, and the animal frame could not be built up 

 without it; this at once shows the necessity of it in plants, as all 

 animal creation feed and live upon these, or on such animals as 

 do. Plants look sickly and do not thrive if they cannot get it, 

 even if the soil is good in other respects but deficient in this. 

 Here is the wisdom of Providence that man may see in an early 

 stage the symptoms of disease, and exercise his intellect and 

 industry to discover the cause, and, like a good physician, prompt- 

 ly apply the remedy. 



Professor Antisell has given us a luminous and correct history 

 of phosphate of lime and its uses in agriculture, where it exists 

 and how procured, and the best way of preparing it for use. It 

 is to be found in the mineral as well as the animal and vegetable 

 world. If animals and vegetables could be kept in the localities 

 where reared and grown till decay and death, then, perhaps, their 

 remains would keep up a supply of the article ; but they are sold 

 off and removed to distant places, and much of their remains 

 wasted and lost by removal, and others applied to new and remote 



