THE 
AMERICAN NATURALIST. 
VoL. xiv. — FULY, 1880. — No. 7. 
THE USE OF AGRICULTURAL FERTILIZERS BY THE 
AMERICAN INDIANS AND THE EARLY 
ENGLISH COLONISTS} 
BY G. BROWNE GOODE. 
N the course of a somewhat exhaustive study of the natural 
and economical history of that member of the herring family 
known on our Atlantic coast under such various names as “ men- 
haden,” “ pogy,” “bony-fish,” “moss-bunker,” “white-fish,” “ bay- 
alewife,” “ bug-fish,” “ yellow-tail ” and “fat-back,” Brevoortia 
tyrannus (Latrobe) Goode, my attention was incidentally called to 
a matter of some interest to anthropologists—the use of fish 
fertilizers in agriculture by the Indians of New England and Vir- 
ginia. The menhaden is, at the present day, the source of an 
immense annual product of commercial fertilizers. In the year 
1878 between 900,000,000 and 1,000,000,000, or perhaps 200,000 
tons of these fish were captured between Cape Henry and the 
entrance to the Bay of Fundy. A large part of the catch is con- 
sumed by the numerous oil and guano factories of Maine, Rhode 
Island, New York, Connecticut and Virginia. After the oil has 
been extracted the remainder is dried and sold to farmers and to 
the manufacturers of super-phosphates and other artificial fertil- 
izers, who use it as a “base for nitrogen.” Agricultural chemists, 
- the rating of commercial manures, value the nitrogen contained 
in them at twenty-five cents a pound. The amount of nitrogen 
derived from menhaden in 1875 was estimated to be equivalent to 
that contained in 60,000,000 pounds of Peruvian guano, the gold 
value of which would not have been far from $1 ,920,000. 
1 Read before the Anthropological Society of Washington, November, 1879. 
VOL XIV.—No. vit, 31 
