Chemical Field Lectures: a Familiar Exposition of the Chemistry 
of Agriculture, addressed to Farmers. By Dr. Juuius A. 
Srockuarpt. ‘Translated from the German and edited, with 
Notes, by Artuur Henrrey, F.R.S., F.L.S., etc. To which 
is added a paper on Irrigating with Liquid Manure, by J. J. 
Mecui, Esq. Henry G. Bohn. Price 5s. 
This work on Agricultural Chemistry cannot be too strongly 
recommended to the attention and repeated perusal of English 
farmers. Its author is evidently well qualified to instruct his coun- 
trymen, the Germans, on the most essential of all human sciences 
or employments, and his book has been translated by a gentle- 
man well known by his previous labours in this field to be quite 
competent to the task of rendering his author intelligible to the 
English reader. The English edition is made more valuable than 
the original by the copious notes which enrich it. Our agricul- 
tural readers—and we hope we have many of this class—will have 
a better idea of the value of the work from a brief notice of its 
contents than from any critical opinion of ours. The Lectures 
are twenty in all, and treat on the following subjects, viz. the 
nutrition of plants, their increase by manuring, various manures, 
guano, bone-dust, oilcake, malt-dust, salts, lime, marl, gypsum, 
farmyard manure, drainings of towns (sewage), etc.; also on the 
mode of converting mineral, vegetable, and animal refuse mto 
manure, on soil, on impoverishing and enriching of soils, on water, 
air, hight, heat, and other concomitants of vegetation. All these 
raultifarious subjects are amply, plainly, and briefly discussed in 
these twenty Lectures. 
While we thus conscientiously state that the work before us 
is well entitled to the highest meed of praise we can give, and 
that it is entitled to an unqualified commendation as a genuine 
practical work, we do not in every case coincide with the trans- 
lator and annotator, or with his author; for example, in note to 
p. 73, if we understand Professor Way’s report on the fertilizing 
effects of sewage, both the translator and the professor throw cold 
water on the scheme of rendering the drainage of towns profitable 
as a fertilizer. We think the statements of the value of the 
Watford, Rugby, and especially the Edinburgh, drainage, a suffi- 
cient proof that town sewage is available as a means of fertilizing 
the soil. Mr. Mechi’s paper (we wish it were longer) appears to 
