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LI. On the Abvantages of employing Vegetable Matter as 

 Manure in afresh State. By Thomas Andrew Knight, 

 Esq. F. R. S. $c. President 



Read January 6, 1812. 



Writers upon agriculture, both in ancient and modern 

 times, have dwelt much upon the advantages of collecting 

 large quantities of vegetable matter to form manure ; whilst 

 scarcely any thing has been written upon the state of decom- 

 position, in which decaying vegetable substances can be em- 

 ployed, most advantgeously, to afford food to living plants. 

 Both the farmer and gardener, till lately, thought that such 

 manures ought not to be deposited in the soil till putrefac- 

 tion had nearly destroyed all organic texture ; and this 

 opinion is perhaps, still entertained by a majority of gar- 

 deners ; it is, however, wholly unfounded. Carnivorous ani- 

 mals, it is well known, receive most nutriment from the flesh 

 of other animals, when they obtain it most nearly in the state 

 in which it exists as part of a living body ; and the experi- 

 ments, I shall proceed to state, afford evidence of considerable 

 weight, that many vegetable substances are Best calculated 

 to re-assume an organic living state, when they are least 

 changed and decomposed by putrefaction. 



I had been engaged, in the year 1810, in some experi- 

 ments, from which I hoped to obtain new varieties of the 

 Plum ; but only one of the blossoms, upon which I had 

 operated, escaped the excessive severity of the frost in the 



