86 
Notes on Market-gardening and Vine-culture 
doubt that a large amount of valuable produce is economically 
obtained from a soil which an uninitiated observer would con- 
sider impossible to cultivate under the circumstances which I 
have attempted to describe. 
When taking leave of M. Maille, I mentioned the bogs of 
Ireland, told him of their neglected condition, and their micro- 
scopic rents, and asked him whether it would not be worth his 
while to make a personal examination of them with a view 
to emigration. His exclamation, evidently sincere, was : — " Si 
J'etais jeunc !" 
Sewage Market-gardening. 
Sewage-farming has already been frequently treated of in this 
Journal ; and the Report of the Judges of the Sewage Farms 
which were entered to compete for the Prizes offered by the 
Mansion House Committee, in connection with the recent Inter- 
national Agricultural Exhibition at Kilburn, immediately pre- 
cedes this article. The best results hitherto attained in England 
by the application of sewage to the land are there described in 
detail. The object of this short notice is much less ambitious, 
namely, to draw attention to the manner in which sewage is 
profitably applied in the vicinity of Paris to the growth of 
market-garden crops, — a means of utilising faecal matters which 
appears to have been hitherto somewhat neglected in the United 
Kingdom.* 
It is obvious that all farmers cannot turn market-gardeners, if 
only because fresh vegetables deteriorate by being carried long 
distances. On the other hand, land that is utilized for the 
defaecation of sewage is nearly always close to a large town, 
where market-garden produce is in great demand. It therefore 
seems a natural inference that the growth of vegetables, fruits, 
and flowers, adapted to the requirements of the local market, 
should be one of the principal objects of the sewage-farmer, if 
experience or experiment should prove that sewage-irrigation is 
favourable to the profitable production of such crops. 
In England, this question is at present a matter of experiment, 
while in Trance, on the sandy plain of Gennevilliers, it has for 
some few years been demonstrated to be a success, by the ex- 
perience on a considerable scale of many occupiers of barren 
land, which had hitherto been nearly worthless from either a 
horticultural or an agricultural point of view. 
If we refer to Mr. Morton's description of " Half-a-dozen 
English Sewage Farms," published in the Second Part of this 
* The Judges of Sewage Farms remark, " Tliat the growing of garden-stuff f u 
a sewage farm is more or less a mistake." — Vide supra, p. 61. 
