474 Use of Fertilizers by American Indians [July, 
In studying the development of this great industry, my atten- 
tion was naturally directed toward a search for the beginning of 
the employment of fish in agriculture. As I have narrated else- 
where at considerable length,! the present oil and guano industry 
originated in Maine, about the year 1850, through the experi- 
ments of an old woman, who, while boiling some fish for chicken 
feed, observed the accumulation of a scum of oil upon the sur- 
face of the water; and about this time, or a little later, small 
factories were established in Connecticut and Eastern Long 
Island. Long before this, however, the farmers of New England 
and New York were accustomed to manure their corn and potato 
fields with the entire fish, in a raw state. This custom prevails to 
a great extent, even to the present day, notwithstanding that the 
experience of thoughtful agriculturists has shown it to be inju- 
rious. The usual method in sowing corn is to place an entire 
menhaden in each hill, together with the few grains of seed, and 
in planting potatoes to lay down a continuous row of fish, head 
to tail, in the furrows, before the potatoes are put in. The oil 
thus introduced with the flesh into the earth is entirely useless as 
a fertilizer, and permeating the soil renders it peculiarly liable, 
first to become soggy and heavy, and then to bake hard and crack 
with the heat of the sun. Many farms in Connecticut and Long 
Island are pointed to as having been ruined by this mode of 
planting. 
My friend Prof. Atwater has searched the annals of European 
agriculture, and can find no record of the use of fish fertilizers 
before 1850, since which time they have been employed to some 
extent in Norway, England, Prussia and France. In America, 
however, their use dates back to the first colonization, and doubt- 
less, as I shall show below, among the Aborigines, long previous 
to the discovery of the country. | 
Important, and in fact unanswerable, evidence is supplied by 
the etymology of the two names, “menhaden” and “ pogy ” or 
“ poghaden,” in use in different parts of New England. I quote 
from a letter received from Mr. J. Hammond Trumbull, in 1874: 
“In response to yours of the 14th (December), respecting the 
local names of Brevoortia, about all I can give you is in my ote 
to the new edition of Roger Williams’ Key, Ch. XIX. Williams 
names together, among spring fish, ‘ Aumsoig and Munnawhat- 
1A History of the Menhaden, etc., in Report U. S. Commissioner of Fisheries, 
Part v ¢for 1877), 1879, pp. 1-529; pp. 161 ef seg. 
