AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 359 



can flow from it, no waste can take place by any amount of 

 saturation. While saturated with water the putrefactive fer- 

 mentation can not proceed; and the offensive smell that issues 

 from it is of no sort of consequence. The escaping gases from 

 fresh or saturated manure form no part of the gaseous elements 

 which are the food of plants. 



The great objection to the too abundant saturation, is not only 

 the excessive weight to be removed, but that the preparatory fer- 

 mentation, which is not exhaustive, cannot proceed. When ma- 

 nures are removed to the soil, they are intended to fertilize before 

 fermentation has taken place, and partially spread, so that the 

 heaps are too shallow for it to commence. There is no essential 

 waste during winter, except it may be by solutions from it flowing 

 oft' upon the frozen surface, before they can sink into the soil. 

 The rains do not materially affect them while the earth is thawed, 

 as what they dissolve sinks into it. 



Professor Voelcker, of] tlie Agricultural College of Cirencester, 

 England, and John Johnston, an extensive farmer of western New- 

 York, have, almost from the antipodes, simultaneously announced, 

 one the tlieory and the other the practice of this principle, and 

 its seeming antagonism to the favorite sentiment, has elicited great 

 needless discussion. They have both asserted that there was no 

 essential difference in the effect of manures carried in full or 

 winter to the fields to be fertilized, and those made under shelter 

 or in heaps in the yard; and in this they are right, when they 

 refer to manure uncombined witli foreign substances, and exposed 

 to fire-fanging or saturation. Eut when they assert the same 

 regarding those manures comliined with foreign substances, which 

 they reduce to a condition for pabulum, they are wrong. Manures 

 removed to the soil from a yard saturated with watei% are not, nor 

 ever can be, distributed equally over the soil. Clumps and pastey 

 masses are flung around, with dry and saturated stalks and unrot- 

 ten straw, which not only afford unequal nourishment to the soil 

 when prepared by putrefaction, but actually destroy most of the 

 germinating seeds in their vicinity, by tlie virulence and abun- 

 dance of their first crude solutions. Now, Mr. Johnston's success, 

 and Professor Voelcker's truth, consists in a condition being met 



