192*2.] Wisdom and Polly of Ancient Book-Farmers'. 



215 



Hugh Plat. Memory of smells. is peculiarly tenacious. Those 

 who have once experienced the .stench of sprats on fields in the 

 Isle of Wight, sixty years ago, have not forgotten it. For more 

 inland counties there were slaughter-house refuse and diied 

 blood. The valuable properties of malt-dust were, as the lists 

 show, early appreciated and more generally available. 



Seventeenth century writers provided farmers with a con- 

 siderable choice of nitrogenous manures. They were less rich 

 in their suggestions of substances containing either phosphoric 

 acid or potash. Possibly " snaggreet," the shelly deposit which 

 is mentioned by Child and Blith, may have been mainly valu- 

 able as a phosphatic manure. Some phosphates would also be 

 contained in Cornish sea-sand. Otherwise bones were the only 

 available substance. Traditionally their value was observed by 

 a Yorkshire master of foxhounds on the grass surrounding the 

 kennels. At first they seem to have been roughly broken by 

 hand labour on the farm. P>ut by the middle of the 18th cen- 

 tury it had become a trade to grind bones for agricultural use, 

 and the value of boiling or steaming them was also recognised. 

 Their use, as has been noted, was recommended by Blith in 

 1653, and similar advice was given by subsequent writers in the 

 17th century. The discovery of coprolites by Professor Henslaw 

 (1845; in Cambridgeshire is comparatively recent. 



P'or potash, farmers depended entirely on ashes. Their use 

 is recommended in all the early lists of manurial substances. 

 Some evidence exists to show that an industry was established 

 for their production and supply. Thus William Ellis, the Hert- 

 fordshire farmer, speaks of a potash kiln in Buckinghamshire. 

 It is also on record that, in the 18th century, Kentish hop- 

 growers organised a system of collecting the wood-ashes of 

 neighbouring cottagers. Essential though potash is, it is espe- 

 cially valuable in its effect on some cf the crops which were the 

 latest comers in English agriculture, such as mangolds and 

 potatoes. The field cultivation of potatoes, recommended by 

 John Foist er (1664), but not practised outside Lancashire on any 

 extended scale till the last century, has owed much of its later 

 development to the discovery of the Stassfurt deposits. 



Live Stock. — The illustrations given from agricultural 

 writers of the 16th and 17th centuries, show that many of the 

 triumphs of modern farming had been anticipated. The 

 materials were already collected for the great agricultural ad- 

 vance which took place in the last forty yens of the reign of 

 George III. It may be added that, as early as L645, the Qecea- 



