240- 
Salt Experiments and Mangolds. 
Analyses made for Members of the Royal Agricultural Society, 
January to December, 1863. 
Guano 40 
Superphosphates and similar artificial manures .. .. 64 
Nitrate of soda and salts of ammonia 25 
Refuse manures 29 
Bone-dust ' , 24 
Limestones and mails 37 
Soils 28 
Waters 10 
Oilcakes 91 
Feeding-meals and vegetable productions 10 
Examinations for poison 5 
363 
X. — Salt Experiments and Mangolds. By Dr. Augustus 
Voelcker. 
COMMON salt has been employed in all ages and in all countries 
for the purpose of promoting the growth of cereal and legu- 
minous crops, grass, and roots — in short, every description of 
agricultural produce. 
It has, moreover, been specially recommended, by experienced 
and intelligent farmers, as a most useful accessory manure 
for the mangold crop. On the strength of their testimony it 
must be admitted that salt has proved of much utility to mangolds 
in many instances, yet we must be prepared to meet with others 
in which it is certainly useless, and may even be hurtful. 
When facts appear to contradict each other, it is of no avail to 
deny the validity of practical evidence, or to accept only those 
facts as true which agree best with our individual experience ; 
we must rather try to gather information from our failures, as 
well as from successful experiments. In common agricultural 
life an experiment with this or that manure by which a con- 
siderable increase in the crop is obtained is characterised as a 
success ; but if unattended by such increase, as a failure : whereas, 
in reality, such a success is often rather a failure. For, in a more 
philosophical sense, experiments are really successful only when 
they teach something that can be clearly recognised as an abiding 
lesson either for warning or for imitation. Upon the accumula- 
tion of a mass of such well-ascertained facts, our ultimate object, 
namely the establishment of general principles applicable to agri- 
culture, must depend. 
In this more philosophical sense, it must be confessed that we 
do not possess many successful agricultural experiments with salt. 
It has, perhaps, been tried more extensively and under a greater 
variety of circumstances than any other fertilizer, and yet in 
