V MANURES 79 



in humus, no hoeing on the surface can prevent the 

 plants from suffering in a hot dry summer, and some- 

 thing in the nature of a top-dressing or a mulch is 

 necessary. But that will not make it a Eose soil, 

 where H.P.s can be grown satisfactorily. 



Avery good authority recommends that, in planting, 

 the manure be applied in the fashion of a sandwich ; 

 that is, I take it, manure below, then soil, then the 

 roots, then more soil, some manure over that, and the 

 soil again at the surface. The danger here, I think, 

 would be of either making the top layer of manure so 

 thin as to be nearly useless, or getting the roots too 

 deep. 



Top-dressings of brewers' grains, or other com- 

 pounds, are recommended by Dean Hole and other 

 writers, but I think that on a proper Rose soil some of 

 the above disadvantages would be found connected 

 with any one of them. 



Of solid manure not made up of straw, night-soil is 

 perhaps the most important. And as a strong believer 

 in the earth system I am tempted here to enlarge upon 

 the well-worn theme of the folly of civilised mankind 

 in wasting immense quantities of manure, which they 

 spend large sums in replacing, by discharging in into 

 the rivers where it does untold harm, instead of re- 

 turning it to the earth, as God commanded Moses, to 

 the great advantage of their health, their pockets and 

 their gardens and fields. 



Science continues to show more and more, on the 

 one hand by the light it throws on the dissemination 

 by water of typhoid fever and cholera, and on the 

 other by the discovery of the purifying mission of 

 the bacteria in the surface soil, that earth is the 

 best receptacle for night-soil and water the worst. 



