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CONSIDERATIONS ON HEATH SOIL. 
If any of our friends who possess the Magazine of Botany from its commencement, 
will refer to the 191st page of Vol. II., they will meet with a few remarks which 
we penned above five years ago, on the subject which we now propose to resume, 
believing it to be of greater moment to the gardener than at the first glance he might 
conceive to be. 
We have one] statement to correct ; but the experience of years, has, in other 
respects, tended to confirm all that was cursorily alluded to in 1835. The error 
to which we refer is in the following lines : — " The sandy heath soil of Bagshot is 
of a greyish black tint ; it contains a very great proportion of pure white sand, 
with, perhaps, scarcely one-tenth part of black decayed vegetable matter." 
A variety of contingent circumstances, to which it would be useless to allude, 
have recently led to several more minute and exact analyses of that black soil of 
Bagshot ; and besides this, a large portion of it came into our possession in 1837, 
which might be regarded as a more fair specimen of the soil which nurserymen 
obtain from Bagshot Heath, than was the first we obtained from a friend. 
The proportion of sand to that of vegetable matter appears to be nearly as 20 
to 4 ; therefore, any specimen which exists in the form of unctuous connected clods, 
may be presumed to contain five parts of sand by weight, to one of black earth 
destructible by fire : but if the sample be entirely powdery, without fibre, and 
incapable of any adhesion when wetted, it is bad and worthless when used alone, 
and consists of little else than white silicious sand. 
We did not suspect that there existed as much difference in these moor-soils — in 
all of which heaths will and do grow wild — as in loams and the more common soils. 
But we have recently proved that those indefinite directions which are to be found 
in many periodicals on the application of peat, are calculated to mislead : for what 
one writer means to express by the term, may be altogether dissimilar from that 
which a reader may have at command. 
Thus, a person who is constantly employed in propagation, and has thousands of 
plants under his care, on handling a sample from Bagshot, observed to us, that 
it was poor stuff, totally unlike the brown peat which was used near Epsom 
in Surrey. A specimen of that was obtained and analyzed : in colour, its 
finer vegetable portion was of a brown not unlike Scotch snuff, but of a deeper 
tint, and abounding with small flakes, like the broken tissue of very old fern-stalks. 
By the action of fire, twenty grains, when quite dry, lost thirteen grains, leaving 
seven grains of white sand. A second specimen, more black, and with many white 
visible particles, lost eight grains of twenty by fire ; and a third, obtained from a 
nurseryman in Berkshire, differed little from the first cloddy specimen from Bagshot. 
Thus, cultivators may be completely misled ; and from what we have recently 
VOL. VII. NO. LXXXIII. K K 
