HORTICULTURAL JOURNAL. 177 



Your leader of the 1st May, in reply to professors of chemistry, was to 

 the point. It would seem as though the Almighty denied rain to the Pe- 

 ruvian Islands, to fit. them for the store houses of nitrogen, to supply its 

 waste in the other portions of the globe. It does not take half a chemist to 

 discover that Guano is more strongly azotised than any other animal excrement, 

 and that it contains less of the phosphate to its azote (nitrogen) than any 

 other known manure, not chemically prepared ; hence the assertion that 

 "Guano is chiefly valuable for the phosphate of lime it contains," may 

 seem strange, if not outre, coming as it does from a man with a handle to 

 his name. But it is no argument to invalidate the capacity of the man, 

 for I presume there is not a professor rn our land worthy of the name, who 

 will not confess at the age of sixty, that he was a babe when he first re- 

 ceived his diploma. He who is capable and loves to learn, learns fastest af- 

 ter he begins to teach others ; if it was not so the schoolmaster would soon 

 become a dogmatical pedagogue, a blind leader to the blind. It is far better 

 to commit inadvertant blunders, which may be easily corrected even by our- 

 selves, than to spend time bunting up obsolete authorities to confirm us and 

 our readers that we are right, when a very little study of nature's- simple 

 lessons would couvince us that we were wrong. 



Methinks the day is at hand when farmers will begin to feel thenVselves a 

 privileged class, not the the mere blind drudges in nature's great laboratory.', 

 but intelligent co-workers with her, with that faith in her infallibility which 

 lightens labor and gives success to every experiment. Tell a man how he 

 misapplies his labor, wastes his manure or suffers it to deteriorate by the loss 

 of that organic matter which is as volatile as it is indispensable to vegetable 

 nutrition, and he may assent to the truth of your doctrine ; ; but it will be 

 evident that its importance has not either penetrated his mind- 6'r affected 

 his will ; but when he sees his neighbor reap the immediate benefit of a bet- 

 ter system, his prejudice lets go its hold, and he becomes a zealous convert 

 to a better practice. Last fall a man living at Buffalo serif nere for a 

 quantity of pipe and tile to drain a lot of 18 acres of intervale land on 

 Buffalo creek, four miles from the Lake. When he was putting down these 

 tile two farmers rode up to the fence ; one said to the other, " What 

 on earth are they doing with those pieces of earthen V* " I don't know," 

 was the reply. "I suppose they are for some kind of steam works." The 

 man who tilled that lot the year before, ridiculed the idea that it required 

 draining; he said it was all sandy loam but the low clayey patch next 

 the plank road, that the water never stood on any part of it the »ext day 

 after a rain ; that even the elay patch always got dry enough to - plow by 

 the middle of May. This spring he saw that field plowed early in April, 

 clay and all; so incredulous was he that the clay was dry enough to plow. 



