49-2 



THE AGRICULTURAL GAZETTE. 



octettes 



ROYAL AGRICULTURAL OF ENGLAND. 



Weekly Council, July 13.— Mr. Miles, MJP, Pre- 

 sident, in the chair. 



LECTURE ON THE USE OF FISH AS MANURE. 

 Professor Way, consulting chemist to the Society, commenced 

 his lecture by referring to the importance of the subject. The 

 employment of artificial manures, however much it might have 

 extended, was yet in its infancy, and in the course of 10 years 

 it was probable that 100 acres would he artificially manured for 

 every acre that was so treated now; hut this could only happen 

 with the aid of fresh sources of supply of the raw material for 

 the manufacture of such manures. There was the greatest diffi- 

 culty in obtaining the material to supply the manure market. In 

 the case of phosphate of lime the demand had so increased that 

 the price had nearly doubled in the last two or three years. 

 Jt was, however, fortunate that phosphate of lime, occurring very 

 largely as a mineral deposit, had been searched for and found in 

 several localities, and other supplies of it were opening up, which 

 promised eventually to meet any demand. No less important 

 than phosphate of lime, as an element of manure, was some form 

 of nitrogen of which the value was so abundantly proved. Now 

 \t could not be doubted, as he hoped to show, that such a source 

 of nitrogen, in the highest degree available for the wants of 

 vegetat ; on, existed in tish. This source of nitrogen was prac- 

 tically unlimited, and he could not think that the obstacles in 

 the way cf obtaining it in suilicient abundance and at a moderate 

 price werQ by any means formidable. The importance of this 

 subject, Mr. Way said he felt to be so great that although it had 

 Jieen ably discussed before, and he might not be able to add any- 

 thing very new to what had been previously said, the present 

 lecture would, he believed, be productive of good, if only in 

 keeping the attention of the agricultural public alive to 

 the question. Of the value of fish and fish refuse as manure 

 there could be little dispute. For a very long period the 

 Tefnse of the pilchard fisheries in Cornwall, and of the herring 

 fishery in the eastern counties and in Scotland, had been employed 

 as manure with the best effects. And in seasons when they were 

 Abundant some kind of fish were caught expressly for this pur 

 pose — as in the case of sprats in the counties of Essex, Kent, 

 and Sussex— the dog fish in Dorsetshire, &c. The use of fish, 

 however, in its natural state was necessarily confined to a com- 

 paratively short distance from the place where it was caught; 

 bo valued, however, was this manure that he had seen Hop and 

 Wheat fields covered in the winter with sprats at a distance of 

 25 miles from the sea, and that before the days of railways and 

 when the farmer had to send his teams to fetch them home. There 

 was a fresh abundance of evidence of the value offish as manure, 

 and the question was to what that value was to be referred. Mr. 

 Way then gave a statement of the composition of different fish, 

 exhibiting a table of analyses lately made in his laboratory on 

 the subject. He remarked in the first place that the quantity of 

 water in fish was not nearly so great as was usually thought. It 

 Tras a vulgar error to suppose that fish was less solid than flesh ; 

 on the contrary, whilst the flesh of the ox contained as much as 

 77 per cent, of water, different kinds of fish varied from 60 to 65 

 percent., and some contained much less than this even. The 

 •quantity of nitrogenous matter in fish varied considerably ; to 

 loll ingredient no doubt a great portion of the manuring 

 .property of the fish was due. We had experience of the 

 value of dried blood, of woollen rags, of horses' hair, and 

 other animal substances, all of which were powerful manures; 

 and the nitrogenous parts of fifth being of the same com- 

 position could not fail to have the same effect upon vegetation. 

 The next ingredient In fish was the oil: the Society would 

 Temember that he published in the Journal, in the year 1848. 

 analyses of experiments made in that and the preceding 

 season, and that he had found in those fish as much as 18 or 

 19 per cent, of fatty matter, a result which was at that time, 

 he believed, quite unlooked for. Mr. Sullivan had more 

 recently found 13 per cent, of oil in herrings. They would 

 ste by the table of results that the oil in different fish varied 

 very much; in one case, that of mackerel, it was remarkably 

 large. In a mackerel examined this last wtek, he had found as 

 mnch as 24£ per cent, of oil, or one-fourth part of its entire weight. 

 In this fish the oil seemed to substitute part of the water found 

 •in other varieties, for it did not contain more than 44 per cent, of 

 moisture, or two-thirds of that usually present. The quantity 

 -of nitrogen and of ash was also very large, both of them very 

 considerably larger than in any other fish of which the 

 comparison was known. If available in quantities, there- 

 fore, this fish would be very valuable for manure. Now, 

 ■considering the large proportion of oil in fish, it became im- 

 portant to consider of what value it might be in manure. It 

 had become the fashion of late years to give too exclusive a con- 

 sideration to the importance of nitrogen in vegetation,— not that 

 we could too mnch value this important element, but that we 

 •were in danger of neglecting those substances which took a less 

 prominent but a no less necessary part in the economy of vege- 

 tation,— that carbonaceous matter in the soil was beneficial if 

 not indispensable to profitable cultivation, did not seem to admit 

 <>f a doubt, and if so there might he clearly a choice between car- 

 bonaceous substances according to their rate of decomposition, &c 

 JSow, oils were very susceptible of oxidation with the production, 

 or course, of carbonic acid. He might only mention in illustra- 

 tion the spontaneous combifstion often occurring when oily rags 

 used for machinery, «&c, had been thrown into a heap, and by the 

 absorption of oxygen and heat consequent upon it had in many 

 cases caused great destruction of property. Then, again, the 

 manufacture of M drying oils," as they were called, by boiling 

 Linseed and other oils in contact with the air; the experiments 

 -of Saussure, who placed different oils under receivers of air and 

 found at the end of the experiments that all the oxygen had 

 become carbonic acid at the expense of the oil, were also to the 

 purpose. Now it was easy to see that oil distributed through a 

 porous soil would, on account cf the great surface exposed, suffer 

 rapid oxidation, and give off a ready supply of carbonic acid, 

 which at particular periods of their growth might be most im- 

 portant to some plants. Mr. Way quoted passages from the 

 irork of Dr. Home, printed in 1762, and the " Georgical Essays' 7 

 -of Dr. Hunter, a few years later, to show that a very high opinion 

 of the value of oil as manure was held by early writers. 

 He 4 1ro referred to the experiments of Earl Spencer 

 with oil— to the nse of whale blubber, which, however, no 

 doubt owed much of its value to the flesh. He showed 

 also that many of the substances known as powerful manures 

 ana containing nitrogenous matter also contained oil. Thus 

 -wooJien rags, Rape-cake, &c, might owe part of their efficacy 

 »hii«f ■^ au6 ?." Ra Pe-<*ke contained about 4 per cent, of nitrogen, 



™i Vif ° l \ Varied from 12 ,0 ,5 P er cent - A g ftin : shoddy' (f )r 

 ZUrn 11 ^ Wl i, h P erna ps in some cases, as he had found, 



£**££**£«?*£* 3 , per cent " of nitro S en > furnished upon 

 was krf^t e6n 25 and 30 P er cent - ot oiI - This substance 

 of oil 21 V. 8 a g00d manure - On the whole this subject 

 o 1 would i-itw? 8 * w ? wel1 wort1 ' ] <*> kin S J "to; not that 



for™ ; r L l £*ll t0 J* used *'™«y as a manure (its value 

 ior ower purposes heintr Ant.^^ ** — 1. _ A ■« 



*hat we 

 which 



•nTiUhl 08 ^ W** ° pposed t0 such a «w of it), but 

 ttS^J^J5» "2!."™**. stance, in 



ctracted as suil- 

 any members of 



wnicn it occurred, and could not profitablv be i 



£• quality of phosphate of lime was much as 5 per cen^of th^ 

 fish in its dried state, and about the same in the mLkerelf this 



phosphate of lime could not be wUhTuTits use. Mr. \V ay next 

 directed attention to the various methods of preserving *h &£ 

 had been proposed, including those of Mr. ^*L^M 

 arid— of Mr Elliott by the use of alkali— of Mr. Bethell, by 

 : empToymentof £ oils-and of M. de Molons by treat- 

 ment with high pressure steam. He also ^ntmned the 

 Plan which was adopted by a manufacturer o '™*™ » (Mi. 

 Stevens), who had a contract for the refuse fish of Billingsgate 

 market/of incorporating the fish ^superphosphate of hme, the 

 quantity of water in the fish serving to dilute the acid, and being 

 dried up by the natural heat of the process. He remarked how- 

 ever, that there would be no difficulty in preserving the fish if it 

 could be obtained. It was not so much a question of this 

 or that process, but of the supply of raw material. He could 

 not help believing that this was not an insuperable diffi- 

 culty if systematic measures were taken to effect the purpose. 

 Was it affirmed that our system of taking fish was incapable 

 of improvement? Were the nets and other appliances of 

 the fishermen, irMch were the same in kind as we read 

 of 1800 years ago, although possibly improved in detail, 

 were they the last and supreme effort of ingenuity and inven- 

 tion ? Was nothing to be accomplished in the way of extracting 

 from the waters of the sea a greater supply of its teeming popu- 

 lation ? Surelv it was open to improvement. But it seemed to 

 him that the' calculations and arguments on this question 

 were not nsuallv quite to the point. Everybody talked of 

 ''refuse" fish, that is to say, the offal of edible fish, 

 and the fish accidentally caught which were unfit for 

 the food market, and it was said by those who certainly well 

 understood the subject, "a boat with so many men will take in 

 the day such and such a quantity of fish, of which the uneatable 

 fish will amount to so and so, and that quantity will not keep a 

 factory in work or create a manufacture of any national import- 

 ance." But he said that fishing for manure must be the primary 

 and the capture of edible fish the secondary consideration if they 

 desired to raise this into a great national question. And we 

 had yet to learn what would be the result of a day's labour of a 

 given number of men, when their attention was directed not as 

 now, to the comparatively rare and valuable fish, but to those 

 which hitherto they had despised and avoided. In his opinion, 

 the statistics hitherto put forward were worth nothing, because 

 they were not derived from this point of view. In the search 

 after fish for the manufacture of manure the proverb that " All 

 is fish that comes to the net" ought to be varied to "All is fish 

 that the net can reach." Prof. Way concluded his lecture, as he 

 had begun it, by urging the necessity of encouraging every attempt 

 toobtain new sources of raw material forthemanufacture of manure. 

 Without this a term would be reached when the competition 

 for manufactured manures with an insufficient supply would raise 

 the price up to the extreme limits at which their use would be 

 remunerative— for a time the deficiency would be met by adul- 

 teration and inferiority of the article, and this, together with 

 the scramble to get manure, would soon wean farmers from their 

 partiality to artificial manures; then, indeed, the progress of 

 agriculture in this country, at all events in the use of artificial 

 manures, would receive a serious check. He did not wish to 

 draw a gloomy picture; but such a state of things must inevit- 

 ably result, if the increasing demand for manures were not met 

 with some new and abundant supply of the raw material. 



On the motion of General Hall, seconded by Mr. 

 Gadesden, the best thanks of the meeting were voted to 

 Professor Way for the excellent lecture he had then 

 delivered ; the President expressing the pleasure it gave 

 him to put and concur in that vote. 



Dr. Calvert remarked on the curious circumstance of 

 some animals, low in the scale of existence, giving out 

 ammonia while alive. He thought theVsource of 

 ammonia a most important inquiry. With regard to 

 insufficient supplies of manuring matter, he believed the 

 Dutch and Chinese, who for ages had known its value, 

 found no difficulty in securing it for their crops, 

 while in England and other countries it was allowed 

 to run down the rivers, not only polluting the 

 water, but destroying the fish. A singular effect 

 of gas tar had occurred to him ; when poured over 

 and mixed up with a manure heap in his yard, 

 it occasioned on decomposition a most agreeable 

 and powerful odour of bitter -almond oil to be ex- 

 haled ; but the manure itself so strongly impregnated 

 the Potatoes, to which it was afterwards applied as 

 manure, with a rank foul flavour, that they could not 

 be eaten. No particular increase of crop, either, had 

 resulted from the manuring in question. — Mr. Paine 

 gave an interesting statement'of a series of experiments 

 he had made on four acres of his land in Surrey, for 

 the purpose of ascertaining the best manure for his 

 Hops. The manures tried were of mineral and 

 organic substances, alone as well as mixed, and each 

 plot consisted of one-eighth of an acre. This land 

 offered great variety of soil, resting on the upper and 

 lower chalk, the firestone and the gault. The result 

 of his trials was that Rape-cake, singly and in combi- 

 nation, for four years in succession proved invariably 

 the best carbonaceous manure for his crop and land. 

 He had found Hops, Turnips, Cabbages, Mangolds, and 

 generally all large-leaved and rapidly developed crops 

 benefited by fish, whale-blubber, oil, and fatty matters ; 

 but that, on the contrary, his corn crops derived no 

 benefit whatever from carbonaceous manures. — 

 General Hall cited the case of Mr. Nash, of New- 

 market, who had applied Rape-cake to his Wheat 

 crops on chalk land with great advantage. — Mr. 

 Truesdale Clarke referred to the Earl of Essex's 

 employment of powdered charcoal in his experiments 

 published in the Journal. — Dr. Calvert referred to his 

 cultivation of the best-selected Grasses in Yorkshire, 

 12 miles from the Nor thai ler ton Station, and invited 

 members proceeding to the Carlisle meeting to diverge 

 to that extent from their route, for the purpose of 

 inspecting what he believed to be a unique collection, 

 the result of 20 years' uninterrupted care and attention. 

 He had found less nutriment in Grasses grown on ex- 

 posed situations than in those in the shade. He had 

 found no season more favourable for his Grasses than 

 the last. He had in preparation a report on this subject 

 for presentation to the Society. 



The Council adjourned to a special meeting at Carl : sle 

 on the 27th of July, and to their ordinary monthly 

 meeting in London on the 1st of August. 



were made by Lord S trad broke~o~n thT^nr^ 

 cultural Statistics :_« They were Veil J ?^¥ 



during: the last two vears attpnw a k~i ^ awir * 4« 



en nufc 



ocouana, ana in some counties in England— and 

 no small compliment to say that the county rf 

 was one of those so selected— to endeavour to m_ 

 a fair result of what was the probabl ^^ 





e amount of 



people in this constantly inc 

 commercial country. If it 



g manufact 



txxty of to. 



luring. 



would be of much advantage to all, it was, as he thari* 

 equally clear that if there were one class mm ■' 

 another who would profit by such results it ij*£ 

 agriculturists themselves. They were aware that in til 

 month of July the corn merchants had for many J»i 

 been in the habit of sending round to every part oHL 

 country to ascertain the probable amount of 

 crons. and that thev had cnnsenuentlv in ,u 



month rf 



September been able to take some little advantage, 

 farmers, by knowing more than the sellers couU 

 bably be acquainted with. The result had 



bw 



1+ 



iarmers naa sometimes sola their corn too soon ifo 

 it would have been wise to retain it ; while at other dan 

 they had been induced to retain their corn, when it 



Farmers' 



East Suffolk.- 



Clubs. 



-At the meeting last week of the 

 East Suffolk Agricultural Society the following remarks 



have been to their advantage tohave parted with it Iffe? 

 could only ascertain from year to year whether the can 

 were likely to be above or below the average, at least tWt 

 would all be upon terms of equality, and be subject to \m 

 fluctuations than had been observed during the last ma 

 years which, he thought, had exceeded the fluctuation 

 of any other period throughout his experience. 

 in stating to them that the county of Suffolk was one «( 

 those selected, he was happy to say that in l3uaioof«t 

 of 1 7 the public expectation was not disappointed ; far 

 they had sent from these unions very correct detail 

 considering the opportunities which had heen presetted 

 for collecting them. If he referred to those four 

 which either omitted to send in, or at all events fumiM 

 very imperfect returns, he should do so, not with aaj 

 intention of casting any slur upon them, but in tk 

 earnest hope that, whenever again called upon, after & 

 mature consideration which the whole subject W 

 undergone, having had the advice and assistance of fc 

 leading gentlemen and agriculturists of their own fr 

 trict, the farmers would feel the great importance of it 

 whole question, and vie with those unions in the elite 

 part of Suffolk— he particularly alluded to the Plow- 

 gate, the Bly thing, and the W an g ford — where a 

 example had been set, which had not been t\aM 

 in any other part of Scotland or England in the full at 

 satisfactory returns which had been furnished. Fn» 

 even what had transpired already, he was enabled te 

 draw some comparisons of the results arising from » 

 mode in which the land had been cultivated minis* 

 the neighbouring county of Norfolk. They weref* 

 aware that there were few, indeed, he did not bene* 

 there was any county in this country where the M 

 was better carried on than in the county of Mm , 

 and if thev remembered that the area of I^ort* 

 compared with the area of Suffolk, was as !•■ 

 11, it would be found that the quantity of land «£ 

 which Wheat and Barley were grown in the p«y» 

 was nearly to a similar extent. But, with lk£" 

 other crops, there was a vast and Beri^dutfJ-J 

 with which it would be well perhaps for this country. 



become fully acquainted. He *™ d **" ^ 

 year in Norfolk there were grown 1°M 8 ° *£* 

 Turnips ; while in Suffolk, so far as , i ^^ 

 tained, the quantity grown was 62,664 acres, 

 rather a remarkable difference, considering meg 

 similarity of the soil of the two counties. Ui J 

 there were grown, in Norfolk 10o8 *^ "J^ 

 number was only 808 for Suffolk. Of in**** gj 

 in Norfolk the number of acres ^» lo {f;V 

 Suffolk the number was but 6390. And when JJ^, 

 of sheep and lambs was taken at near ly a aiw ^ 





ot sneep ana jaraus. waa «»»<=" -- --- • . R( ., w 

 in Norfolk, it was found to amount to Ml.t > , 

 Suffolk it was but 405,944. He woul I ouW 



sunoiK, tne numuei- ««.««----_ 

 took into consideration the difference 



1*4 



tfcex 

 A*» 



we iook into consiuti»nv» ■— - — , . bsre ^r- 



counties, we should find the waste of ana Yl 



in Suffolk to be six times as great as i .^ 



was well aware there were many gen"?" »V t „ 



naa onen tousiucicu ... ».--- ^ •** 



could best be adopted to cultivate* crop ^^ 



was called long summerland W'?** .. , n *** 

 of much difficulty. A near relative o h» ^ _ 

 1853, taken possession of his prop" 7 he flfl * 

 wher'e he might say, without ej-ggj ^ „*;»*• 

 was by no means commensurate «> ^ ll0 ttm 



this district. Upon the arm he ' «jj d " » tf^J 

 with tiles, on one of which he had g g 



Wheat which had yielded in ^ ™ mott *»* 

 on land which had previously nevel | vede Tun»f* 



unuie ouiei nt.u..^ b - 



produced above 1 7 tons per acre on 

 had never before been grown, in 

 an expense of 5*. per acre ', » ■». 



I been 

 tli»«i 



_1W 

 done"* 



■ndinff* 



;gest 





WOU1U SUggcou tv«»~« r„l| n w« -*i» c ~. 



improve the system of long Mo** differe „£ 

 which he would allude was as .to ^ ? 



appeared to exist on m"/*.°* , he forming »- .j 

 b idgeshire, as compared with the tar „ 



found that in Cambridgeshire a 





