The Action of Common Salt as Manure. 
519 
promote early maturity, was here advisable. The question, in fact, 
was entirely one of maturity. 
Salt was taken up in immense quantities by plants. Some time ago 
ho made some experiments on that subject, and he was amazed at 
the enormous quantity which he found plants to absorb. Salt being 
assimilated by jdants, circulated in them ; and, according to their 
structural differences, some plants were benefited and others de- 
stroyed by it. Cabbages would take up an enormous quantity of salt. 
He had seen a plant with the salt taken up by the roots crystallizing 
on the leaves. This property of assimilation in salt was very useful 
for some purposes, but injurious in others. The question was, in fact, 
altogether one of soil. Therefore he believed they were not justified 
in saying, on the one hand, that salt was of no use ; or on the other, that 
it was of very great use. It depended on the application which was 
made of it whether it woidd be useful or the reverse. Some years ago 
he made some experiments on grass-land with salt and with nitrate of 
soda. Now nitrate of soda pushed on the growth of grass, and secured 
a larger produce. Salt, on the other hand, checked it to such an 
extent, that if they used on stiffisli land as much as 10 cwt. per acre, 
they would get less crop, even though nitrate of soda were used with 
it. Cattle were very fond of salt grass, naturally preferring sweet to 
rank herbage ; and if cattle, especially when out of condition, were 
placed in fields where there were large deposits of ammoniacal manure, 
salt would be of great advantage in checking rank vegetation and 
sweetening the herbage. But, then, while salt sweetened the herbage, 
it diminished the total amount of produce. He would only add, that 
his last year's experiments in mangold, so far as they went, tended to 
confirm the view taken by Mr. Lawes. By the use of various quan- 
tities of salt, beginning with 1 cwt. and going up to 9 cwt., he obtained 
residts which did not prove that on a heavy calcareous clay salt pro- 
duced a beneficial effect. 
Mr. J. Hooker (Oatlands, Walton-on-Thames), said : Having made 
some experiments with salt, he had put down the results, which did 
not at all accord with those of Mr. Lawes. His soil was a rather stiff 
clay resting on a sandy subsoil, on the banks of the Thames. He 
took the land in 1860 in a very foul condition. Ten acres he was 
obliged to fallow. Four acres by the side of them, and with precisely 
the same kind of soil, he planted with mangold wurzel, for which crop 
he applied 4 cwt. of salt per acre at different periods of the year. In 
the autumn of 1861 he sowed the plots with rough chaff wheat over 
the whole fourteen acres. The plant came up well, and looked remark- 
ably well up to the time of blooming, giving the promise of a large 
crop ; but then the crop on the ten acres which had received no salt 
entirely broke down. The yield was as follows : the four acres salted 
gave 30 bushels per acre of good quality ; the ten acres which were 
not salted gave 20 bushels per acre of tailing quality. He selected 
samples of straw from each piece for analysis in order to see what 
was the cause of this failure, and whether salt or the want of it had 
anything to do with the result. On examining the ash of that grown 
on the salted land he found that it gave 83 per cent, of silica ; whereas 
