Proceedings .of the Farmers' €lub. 283 



fathers saw starvation staring them in the face till a good Indian, 

 Squanto by name, told them to catch herring and plant them with 

 the corn. This they did, and made good crops. Let ns take a lesson 

 from Squanto, and dung our corn with dead moss-bunkers. 



Mr. D. B. Bruen — I knew a man on Long Island that had a farm 

 too poor to sprout navy beans. So he followed the sea and saved 

 some of his earnings, and came back at length and found his farm in 

 the hands of a stranger. Some tenderness had our mariner toward 

 the old acres, for they held the bones of his sires. So he bougnt it 

 for $2,000, and instead of plowing it he kept on plowing' the sea and 

 hauling in moss-bunkers. He caught millions of them, and when he 

 got ready he spread them thick all over his land, turned them under, 

 and sowed wheat. His crop was forty bushels to the acre on seventy 

 acres, which he sold for $1.50 a bushel, and thus paid for the place 

 twice over with the first crop, and it was the fish that did it. 



Dr. J. V. C. Smith — In my travels as a young man I was in Ger- 

 many and talked with that great luminary of Teutonic science, Herr 

 Pfingster Ehrenburg. One day Herr Pfingster asked me if I knew 

 what made the Nilotic mud so fertile. "Yea," quoth I, "it is vege- 

 table matter brought down from beyond the upper cataract, from the 

 latitude of Senegambia and the Mountains of the Moon." " Nay," 

 quoth he, " not vegetable matter. I have had this marvelous Nilotic 

 mud under my lenses and I have found it full of nameless little fish, 

 reptiles, infusoria. These make the mud of the Nile so rich." 



Dr. Israel Jarvis — Now we press the oil from the moss-bunkers, 

 and the fish cake that comes from the press is as good manure as the 

 whole fish ; in fact better, for the use of fish only as manure makes 

 the land bake, and no good crop is raised with fish after the fourth 

 application. 



The Vanilla Bean as a Vermin Destroyer. 



Dr. Lewis Feuchtwanger — It is not generally known that vanilla 

 exercises similar functions as the Caucasian insect powder (Pyretlirum 

 carneum and roseum), which acts very destructively upon insects 

 infesting the person of man and animals, by stupefying first and then 

 killing them. In all tropical climates insects are very annoying, and 

 the inhabitants of the countries where the vanilla grows in abundance, 

 as in Brazil, Mexico, South America, etc., have, for ages, employed 

 the pods of this creeping plant (epidendrum vanilla or vanilla aroma- 

 tica) in various forms against the attack of the poisonous ant, flea, 

 musquito, fly, etc., by moistening or sponging their bodies with a con- 



