THE AGRICULTURAL GAZETTE 



•"^ " £ heap in as small pieces as possible, and the 

 *** l ° h, made too thick. If marl is used conjointly 



Uf fft BOt tO DC ^ ^^^ ^ gome paftg ^ the regult wlU 



milk *** r ll Still, we must guard against taking 



»~£^?** tba Corn will be laid. 

 •STqutntity of marl to be brought on i 

 ^ tl .t.ted accurately (see p. 32o), 



a certain area 

 ), for this is to 



f l A A as well bv the quality of the soil as by that 

 * l lr\ which both vary. Of clayey marls, containing 



1 *' m Z t carbonate of lime, 3000 cubic feet are brought 



2 **' Magdeburg acre of sandy soil, whilst 80-100 



°\° n Ltl7\s^ ^r the same area if the marl be very 

 ^reoua, »» d > moreoveI% ver * ^erj. Argillaceous 

 i-'l also serve to improve the soil mechanically, 

 •JJjf ^careous marl has merely to decompose the 

 W ^nLic humus, and to supply the crops with lime, &c. 

 AbT the use of marl large tracts of land may 

 „doubtedly be more speedily improved in strength and 

 feflurht to productiveness, it would be well if every large 



rDrietor would examine his land, and see whether there 

 do strata of marl on it. If it be not too far below 

 nd j tg existence may be ascertained by some deep- 

 rooted plants ; the natural growth of the Lucerne will 

 indicate it ; and at places where there are layers of marl, 

 the following plants also will be generally found growing: 

 BratDbles,Colt6foot,Hawthorn,Blackthorn,WildRoses,&c. 



The more certain way, however, to ascertain the existence 

 of marl strata is by boring the ground, and testing the soil 

 brought on the surface by some drops of nitric or other 

 mineral acids, and if there be any effervescence, we may be 

 §ure of having found at least a stratum of a calcareous 

 eral, and further chemical analysis will show whether 

 it has all the properties desired. If a marl stratum has been 

 found iti thickness should be ascertained, for the sake of 

 deciding whether it be worth while to excavate it, as, 

 generally, marl lies so deep, that much soil is to be 

 removed before we can arrive at it. To avoid this, at 

 times, a regular miner's pit may be sunk ; which, how- 

 ever, is so expensive, that the marl must be of very 

 good quality to repay the outlay. At other times, marl 

 may lie so deep, and in such a wet position, that the 

 ipring-water must be carried off by pumps ; which, again, 

 will not pay, if the marl be not very good. In alluvial 

 •oils, the quality of marl will generally improve with the 

 depth, and the lower strata will be richer, not only in 

 lime, but also in potash, common salt, gypsum, phosphate 

 of lime, &c. In this case, the deepest will be the best, 

 and will not require so great a quantity to produce the 

 time effect as that of the upper strata. 



It is advisable to give to marl-holes as convenient an 

 ingress and egress for the waggons and carts as possible, 

 and the soil cleared away is to be thrown back where the 

 marl has been already taken out. Strong marl may be 

 broken of with pick-axes, whilst earthy marl may be 

 worked off with a strong three -pronged fork, which is 

 thrust into the ground. In making a marl quarry, we must 

 guard against undermining the ground, else by the falling- 

 in of the side-walls the workmen may be injured. In 

 order to be sure that we convey to our fields the sub- 

 »Unce needed, it is well to examine the different strata 

 chemically, as, at times, the rock may be so worthless that 

 it ii better to throw it away on the waste heaps. 



267 



greater advantages are opened to him ; he has opportunity I expressed by their equivalents, or in multiples of them. 



of seeing how these gentlemen and their experienced All simple bodies have a fixed combining proportion or 

 *-'— J1 -" ... - equivalent, as nitrogen, 14 ; hydrogen, 1. And the equi- 



valent of compound bodies is expressed by the sum ob- 

 tained by adding the combining numbers of the simple 

 bodies of which it is composed ; thus, ammonia formed aa 

 above, — of nitrogen 11, hydrogen 3, — has 17 for its equi- 

 valent, in which proportion alone it will unite to form salts 



with acids ; thus, carbonate of ammonia is formed of — 

 Carbonic acid: — 



Carbon 6, one eq.-f oxygen 16, two eq.=22 eq. of carb. acid , 

 Ammonia : — 



ON THE CULTIVATION OF FLAX.— No. IV. 



Among the Associations now in operation for the en- 

 couragement and promotion of improvement in rural 

 affairs, Flax cultivation has not been neglected. Allusion 

 a*« been already made to the Belfast Society, the first of 

 toe kind; which, although little more than three years in 

 operation, has already effected a marked improvement 

 throughout the Flax-growing districts of the north of 

 Ireland. That Society wisely sent over a number of intel- 



f Fi ty ° Ung men t0 Bel g ium > whence the finest qualities 

 ? \* na( * hitberto been procured, and also brought over 

 labourers from that countrv to introduce the Belgian sys- 

 tem of management. The" experience of a single season 

 anowed the sound policy of this arrangement, and the 



mpor ^ nt CDa nge it effected ; but, above all, that Society 

 "tea 1 J 8 ln "uence to introduce the Factor-svstem (if I 



•""^^c to introduce me racior-sysieiii ^u j. 

 ™«y be allowed the term), feeling assured that without 

 ™» peculiar feature the object in view could not be 

 ■ ec ed that of enabling the home grower successfully 



■» compete with the foreigner. To this important subject, 



of Fi theatten *ion of those anxious for the extension 



esri * culturein ^is country should be devoted in an 



pecial manner, as one of the most important means of 



eflTt thdr ° b ^ Ct * Nor wiI1 this be found ditncult t0 

 t L- ' as tne Continental factors will readily come over to 



■ country, provided a proper field is before them for 



foil Cttplo - vment of their capital. On this subject the 



lowing extract from a recent Report of the Belfast 



* Of°t C v! ety iS deservin S of attention, 

 factin efactor system, your committee have the satis- 

 fcosin t0 , announce » that this peculiar and new branch of 

 favnn^ki ^ een commer iced amongst us, under the most 



Pwcha u aU i pice8, The s y stem bein S> that ca P itali8ts 



*bo und i WhUe 0n lhe S round from the tarmer » 



of it wh er ! . the Polling and all subsequent treatment 



tendenc f M P erfor med under the immediate superin- 



U W ZT J and . bein S relieved of a large portion of his 



fte other l a !! X,etle8 ' he can 8 iv e undivided attention to 

 ■ ner Products of his land, and is enabled to hold over 



*-* — -— .._.. mmmm\ mm %-.»^w «*ww-« 



agents handle the crops, so as to realise a profit after pay- 

 ing him for it, which he possibly might not have realised 

 for himself, including all his expenses and troubles. The 

 industrious will be stimulated to imitate the improved 

 mode of management they see practised, and the small 

 farmers, more especially, may learn to reap all the benefit 

 of that system they have exemplified to them by the Bel- 

 gian factors and labourers, by introducing hand-scutching, 

 on right principles, in their families, during seasons that 

 otherwise offer no profitable occupation of their time. 



" Gentlemen farmers may also be encouraged to sow 

 Flax, who could not undertake the trouble of superintend- 

 ing its management, or conveniently arrange for its ac- 

 commodation. 



" This new branch of business has been undertaken by 

 two enterprising gentlemen, thoroughly acquainted, by 

 long experience abroad, in every detail of its management ; 

 and they have realised this season every expectation of its 

 great advantages to the country, by the trial they have 

 given to the system. 



** Mr. Welch; from Belgium, early in the year, located 

 himself at Armagh, and commenced training labourers, 

 under Belgian factors, and he purchased, at the proper 

 season, the standing crops in that neighbourhood ; but, 

 losing the services of his principal Beigian superintendent 

 at this critical period of his operations, he limited his 

 purchases to some fifty acres. 



" Mr. Galbraith, of Belfast, purchased in the neigh- 

 bourhood of Lifford and Strabane, some two hundred and 

 fifty acres, which were allotted to the management of 

 Dutch and Belgian factors ; and a spirited example has 

 been thus given, which your committee doubt not will be 

 followed up extensively ; and so strongly impressed have 

 been your committee with the importance of these gentle- 

 men's undertaking to the interests of the country, and of 

 the great benefits likely to arise therefrom, that it was 

 resolved, at a late meeting, to mark their sense of it, by 

 presenting them with a gold medal each (as a memento of 

 the estimation your committee entertain of it, and of their 

 having been the first parties to introduce this new and 

 important branch of business amongst us), accompanied 

 with their best wishes, that their speculations may turn 

 out as successful as they could possibly anticipate, and 

 more substantially remunerative of their exertions." — J. 



Sproule. 



ON THE APPLICATION OF CHEMISTRY TO 



AGRICULTURE UPON RATIONAL 



PRINCIPLES— No. XIV. 



{Continued from p. 235.) 



We have seen in the previous pages that the principles 

 of manuring plants must be founded upon the chemical 

 nature of the soil, and on the food wanted by the 

 plant. We have also seen that a plant, to be per- 

 fected, must have all, not only part of the elements of or- 

 ganic structure ; that as an animal will not live upon 

 either azotised or non-azotised food alone, so the analogy 

 exists in vegetable life, and a plant will not live 

 alone upon nitrogen in ammonia, carbon in Straw, alkali 

 in the nitrates, oxygen or hydrogen in water, silex in 

 sand, phosphorus in bones, or the sulphur and iron in the 

 earth, but that the union of all these elements or princi- 

 ples is necessary. We have also seen that plants, espe- 

 cially those destined for the use of man, have the power 

 of depositing certain principles according to the amount 

 of the necessary elements supplied to them. 



Now, of all the constituents of plants, that which is de- 

 posited in the cells of the seed of Cerealia— Wheat, Bar- 

 ley, Oats ; and of the Leguminosse— Beans, Peas ; and 

 in less quantity in the tuberosa, is the most important to 

 man and the animals dependent upon him : I mean albu- 

 men, which, in the form of gluten, supplies the azotised 

 constituent of Wheat. Surely then the great object of 

 the farmer is to increase this principle in his Wheat by a 

 judicious system of manuring or feeding his plant. The 

 Straw and the dung of his farm-yard will supply abundance 

 of food for the fabric of the plant ; but if he wishes to 

 increase the weight, quality, and quantity of his grain, he 

 will find all the elements necessary for his purpose in 



urine. 



In urine we have almost all the elements of the food ot 



plants. We have, in human urine, urea, containing 

 azote, 3 per cent. ; other salts, containing nitrogen, 1.7 

 per cent. ; sulphates of potash and soda, .010 per cent.; 

 phosphates .46 per cent. And yet, is it not astonishing 

 that the collection and use of urine as a manure should 

 be so much neglected— that hundreds and thousands of 

 pounds of Wheat are daily lost and destroyed in the form 

 of uncollected urine. It is equally clear that of that re- 

 tained by the Straw in the farm-yard, one-half or more of 

 the nitrogen is lost by evaporation during the decomposi- 

 tion necessary to convert the Straw into manure. The 

 phosphates and potash remain, it is true, and their value 

 is great, but the elements of albumen in the urea are lost 

 as carbonate of ammonia by volatilisation. 



To increase the quantity and quality of Corn, then, we 

 must collect all the urine we can from every cottage or 

 house or town in our neighbourhood ; and, having pro- 

 cured it, we must prevent loss from decomposition by 

 fixing the volatile salt of ammonia. 



Ammonia is composed of — 



Nitrogen . . 14 or one equivalent. 

 Hydrogen . . 3 or three equivalents. 



Nitrogen 14+ hydrogen 3 



17 eq.of ammonia. 



39 



And 39 is the equivalent or combining proportion of the 

 carbonate of ammonia. — C. R. Bree, Stowmarket. 



ttU the 



"utlie mn«t ' • • ,auu i ana is enaoiea 10 noiu ovci 



co *pelled I to J h US time for •«»»»*. instead of being 

 •kki which h P » "» g t0 market whatever was first dispos- 

 er in labour * t0 SeU at an y sac «nce, to meet his out- 



' rent » 0r other pressing necessity. But still 



Home Correspondence. 



Potato Planting It will be found, speaking from 



years' experience on a small scale, that using the largest 

 size Potatoes, uncut, for sets, and planting them in rows 

 one yard apart, the sets being two feet and a half from 

 each other, is the right way to plant Potatoes ; the pro- 

 duce will be one-third greater at least, the small Potatoes 

 will be very few, and the crop escape the effects of 

 drought, should it come early in the spring, and escape, 

 because the skin is not broken, the attacks of wire-worms. 

 The above distances are for the main crop ; for an early 

 one the. distance should be 27 inches by 18, and the rows- 

 not moulded up. Moulding up Potatoes retards the 

 formation of the tubers. Should any one not like to trust 

 his whole crop to such proceedings, let him try a small 

 portion of his Potato plot by way of experiment, and 

 I have no doubt as to the ultimate success. — W. Jl. 9 



Reading. 



Potatoes.— \ think the loss and disappointment from 



both curl and rot may, in 99 cases out of every 100, be 

 prevented by the exercise of a little management and 

 common sense. In proof of this I will adduce a few in- 

 stances. In the vicinity of Edinburgh, where excellent 

 Potatoes are grown for the city maiket, it used to be cus- 

 tomary to have seed Potatoes from the southern counties- 

 of Scotland every second or third year, to prevent curl; 

 the dry or mealy quality — constituting the excellence of 

 the Potato to most palates for table — being the cause of 

 curl. Again, when a young man, I remember being 

 solicited by a tradesman in a midland town for some seed 

 of a favourite pink-eyed Kidney to plant in his pet-plot of 

 ground in the suburbs. They all curled ; the fact was, 

 they were w very mealy," as it is called. 3dly — 1 knew 

 a market-gardener in a small way, near Edinburgh, who- 

 was famed for his early Potatoes. His practice always 

 was to dig up and put away sufficient for next year's seed, 

 before they had completed their growth ; they were full of 

 sap and kept so. 1 have myself had early Potatoes com- 

 pletely stopped in their growth by drought, before the 

 period of natural maturity. They were waxy in quality, 

 not good to eat, but made very good seed. Again, an old 

 master of mine who had lived in a situation on the west 

 coast of Argylshire, told me the practice there, was to 

 dress the ground where the portion of Potatoes intended 

 for the following year's seed were grown with fucus from 

 the sea shore ; the quality of the produce was exceedingly 

 waxy and uneatable, but this made them all the better for 

 gee( l— in fact it was done purposely. So much for curl. 

 Now for rot. A neighbour and friend of mine some years 

 since, happened by chance to have a very good crop of 

 Potatoes that were planted late ; but from that he got a 

 crotchet in his head that the lateness was the cause of the 

 superiority of the crop, so that Potato planting afterwards 

 became an habitually protracted process with him. Several 

 years since, about two acres of land was well prepared, well 

 dressed with farm-yard manure, and planted ; but on the 

 advance of the season, not above a third of the lots vege- 

 tated, and many very weakly. My friend, in a disappointed 

 mood, said to me, " I wish you would examine these 

 Potatoes ; they come up very bad, and I do not know what is 

 the matter." The fact was they had been stored in a 

 Potato-house all winter, part of a large mass, that had 

 been turned over and deprived of growths two to three 

 inches long before they were cut into sets for planting. 

 Their vitality was quite exhausted before they were in con- 

 tact with the earth. Now, Sir, how easy it is to guard 

 against these painful results, I leave any one to judge. 

 Soils, manures, and seasons, no doubt, will affect a Potato 

 crop in various ways ; but, in my opinion, will induce 

 neither rot nor curl, if a little care is taken to prevent it. 

 Seed Potatoes should not be of a mealy quality, nor should 

 they be suffered to heat when stored ; nor should the 

 planting be protracted till the Potato has exhausted its 

 vital powers in attempts to grow without soil ; nor should 

 the sets be kept more than 24 hours out of the ground 

 after they are cut.— Quercus. 



Potatoes. — I have just taken up some Potatoes which 

 have been kept in the ground all the winter, and which are 

 quite sound, and at the same time very good tasted, at 

 which I am rather surprised, and I think it would be a 

 good experiment for some of your farming readers to try 

 whether they will not keep better in the ground than ia 

 the Potato-pits ; for in the latter they are, in many in- 

 stances, one mass of putrefaction. — //. J*. T. 



Glass Milk Pans.— -Upon reading Captain Carr's 1 let- 

 ter, published in the Royal Society's Journal, vol. 1- 

 1840, I was struck with the impression that the idea was 

 not only good, but that glass is a better ^ ater,al -X "! 

 purpose than any other, and, taking all ^'^^ the 



To the uninitiated in Chemistry I may observe, that count less costly t , e "P^^^e^Lrthat stated 

 the term equivalent is expressive of the P^F. 11 ^ hesitation in or- 



which bodies unite with each other ; and that all bodies in his letter. J'^^^u of rather more than 

 unite chemically with each other either in the proportions 1 denng for my dairy, which consi 



17 



