490 



THE SOUTHERN PLANTER. 



[August 



or year; and a Chinese would regard as a 

 gross breach of ntianners the departure from 

 his house of a guest who neglects to let him 

 have that advantage to which he deems 

 himself justly entitled in return for his hos- 

 pitality. The value of the excrements of 

 five people is estimated at two Teu per day, 

 which makes 2000 Cai^li^ per Dnnum, or 

 about twenty hectolitres (440 gallons), at a 



price 



of seven florins." The Chinese, ac- 



customed to look on such matters only as 

 objects of commerce and utility, never think 

 of them as nuisances, and take no pains to 

 disinfect them ; but in this country any plan 

 which contemplates the restoration to the 

 land of the lost mineral elements by the pre- 

 servation and use of these excretions, must 

 include some effectual mode of deodoriza- 

 tion. Perhaps, by the use of such antisep- 

 tics as the simple and cheap one lately em- 

 ployed with much success in the hospitals 

 of Paris, viz : an intimate niixture of two 

 to four per cent, of coal tar with ground 

 plaster of Paris, the prejudice may be over- 

 comC; and a regular commencement be made 

 of a system of commerce by which the 

 lands which have been impoverished to feed 

 the cities, shall be renovated by that, to re- 

 move which now constitutes one of their 

 greate^it embarrassments. This commence- 

 ment ought to bo made before the land be- 

 comes so much impoverished that its reno- 

 vation would cost more than the price of; 

 new land at a convenient distance from the 

 city. The ocean has already swallowed up 

 too much of the richness of the soil, on 

 which it has only given us back a scanty 

 interest, in the shape of guano, &c. ; but in 

 view of the great popular prejudice in this 

 relation, and the present low price of new 

 land, such a plan is not likely to become 

 general or effectual until a dense population 

 and a scarcity of new land on our broad con- 

 tinent shall oblige the people to study the 

 true philosophy of agriculture. 



In forcibly presenting views of this na- 

 ture to the agriculturists of Europe and of 

 the world, in the little work before us. Lie- 

 big has performed the office of a faithful 

 monitor : whether his advice will be regard- 

 ed remains to be seen. Like most of his 

 writings, this contains, unfortunately, cer- 

 tain crudities and dogmatical statements, 

 which will excite controversy and tend to 



* 100 Cash are equal to about 4^(1. — about 

 eight cents. 



excite prejudice against it, which will some- 

 what diminish its utility. We may men- 

 tion : First, His emphatic assertion, that 

 vegetable food is not in solution, when it is 

 absorbed by plants, ^but that the mineral 

 elements are absorbed, particle by particle, 

 by the rootlets in immediate contact with 

 them in the soil. Now, if . this were true, 

 we cannot see the reason why plants cannot 

 grow almost as well during a drought as 

 when the ground is moistened by g'enial 

 rains. Because, the soil, by its great power 

 of absorption, can remove dissolved phos- 

 phates and other materials from water which 

 is filtered through it — is no more a reason 

 why it may not give up some of these ab- 

 sorbed substances to water containing car- 

 bonic acid, ammonia, or humus, than the 

 rapid absorption by it of the heat of the sun 

 or the moisture of the atmosphere should 

 lead us to conclude that heat and moisture 

 could not pass off from it again. We have 

 no space for an argument on this topic; but 

 we krioio, from actual experiment on no less 

 than 375 different soils, treated by prolonged 

 digestion, at the summer temperature, in 

 water containing carbonic acid, that not only 

 did the soil, in every instance, give up nota- 

 ble quantities of its essential elements to 

 solvent, (which is similar in nature to at- 

 mospheric water penetrating the soil), but 

 that in some cases, as in virgin prairie soil, 

 rich in humus, and containing but a small 

 proportion of alumina, the quantity of solu- 

 ble matters extracted by the carbonated wa- 

 ter, weighed after it was dried at the boil- 

 ing heat of water, amounted to nearly 2 per 

 cent, of the soil (1.7 and 1.6 per cent.); 

 whilst in few cases was it as little as the 

 tenth of one per cent, of the weight of the 

 soil. And that the extract contains, it is 

 true, much carbonates of lime and magne- 

 sia, .but also much phosphates, sulphates, 

 alkalies, silica, organic matters, &c. To as- 

 sert, then, 8s Liebig does, positively, in the 

 work in ha"nd, that water does not dissolve 

 out the essential elements of the soil ; that 

 the drainage water does not contain any no- 

 table quantities of them ; that land plants 

 differ from water plants, because they do not 

 t*ake their nourishment in the state of solu- 

 tion, &c., is in our humble opinion^ to travel 

 not a little out of the record. 



The tendency of this work, like that of 

 all the writings of this author, is to good 

 and towards improvement. It will excite 

 controversy; as they all have done; but the 



