OF EARTH. 



75 



under this, sink a pit for a cistern, into which cast all the acid plants, 

 bitter and rank weeds that come in your way, and grow in the neglected 

 corners of your grounds, such as esula, hemlock, docks, thistles, fumitory, 

 tobacco-stalks, wormwood, cabbage-leaves and stalks, aconites, the leaves, 

 trash, and offal, such as cattle will not touch ; to these add pigeon and 

 poultry dung, with their quills and feathers ; all sorts of ashes, soot, 

 hogs' hair, horn, bones ; also urine, blood, garbage, pickle, brine, sea- 

 water, (if conveniently to be had,) otherwise pond-water, to sprinkle it 

 with, and keep it moist to accelerate putrefaction ; but when all is well 

 consumed, forbear the pouring on of insipid hquors, and thus leave it till 

 it be dry ; then air, mingle, and work your composts as you were directed 

 above, or boil it into petre, casting what you find not well digested into 

 the cistern again for another year, and, with a little addition, it will give 

 you half the quantity of the former, and, provided that you supply the 

 magazine, a continued and farther increase. Indeed this salt and compost 

 is not immediately fit for use, till it be well dulcified and purged from its 

 over acrimony, therefore mix it well with your mould, and dilute it as 

 you see cause. A receipt is set down by old Glauber for the effecting 

 of wonderful vegetation, by the assistance of certain circulatory vessels to 

 prepare the oily succus, and pinguid juice, which that author teaches in 

 his Miraculum Mundi, to extract not only out of these materials, but out 

 of turf, wood, and stone itself, by calcining and burning them in close and 

 reverberating furnaces, to which a tube, adapted near the bottom, may 

 convey the spirits into a recipient, as he describes the process. 1 mention 

 this the rather, for the real effects of which I have been told of this men- 

 struum from very good testimony: and, doubtless, he who were skilled to 

 extract it in quantity, (and to dulcify and qualify it for use,) a true spiri- 

 tuous nitre may do abundantly more, in the way of the improvements 

 we have celebrated, with a small quantity, than with whole loads, nay 

 hundreds of loads of the best and richest of dry composts which we can 

 devise to make But besides this, any house of ordure, or rancid mould, 



y The whole of this passage is ail unnecessary and expensive multiplication of the farmer's 

 trouble; and, indeed, it seems to have been given by our excellent author rather in con- 

 formity to the philosophy of the times, than from his ovi^n experience or opinion. The 

 boasted receipts of chymists for forwarding the powei's of vegetation, are now justly ex- 

 ploded, and the present age boasts of a philosophy in farming, that lias truth and experi- 

 ment for its foundation. 



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