The Conservation of Farm-yard Manure. 
829 
of a high standard of public health, appears to be, so far, greater than 
the value of the recovered products. But no such counter-considera- 
tions arise to stifle the sigh that goes forth from a true agricultural 
economist, as he leans on the gate of the average farm-yard, and 
looks at the slowly trickling, rich brown stream that drains away 
into the too convenient ditch, the very essence of the carelessly 
piled dung ; nay, even the actual liquid excreta before they have 
undergone the preliminary process of being temporarily absorbed by 
the litter, or incorporated into the form of soon-to-be-rain-soddened 
“ manure.” That this is still the state of things on only too many 
farms most of our readers will be in a position to admit ; and it is 
doubtful whether of late years we have made as much progress in 
the direction of national reformation of our muck-wasting sins as we 
did when chemistry and its revelations were newer — and, conse- 
quently, more shocking. This is, no doubt, in some degree due to 
the fact that we are less dependent than of old time on home-made 
manure. At any rate, it has grown to be our custom to enrich it by 
the consumption of purchased food, and hence much of the waste 
which must necessarily have tended to impoverish our soils is par- 
tially counterbalanced by the increased richness of the portion that 
is saved and applied. 
Furthermore we can, -and do, purchase large quantities of 
artificial manure supplying both nitrogen and phosphates, and so 
are less dependent than we were on the quality of our dung ; while 
the merely physical and mechanical efl'ects on the soil, for which 
dung is largely to be valued, are ultimately much the same whether 
the manure has or has not been impoverished by bad preservation. 
We may still grant that it is inexcusable to waste the essence of 
our dung, but we do not, nowadays, detect so simply and so readily 
as once we could the practical advantages to be derived from its 
prevention ; and even if we could, it is easy — as an excuse for non- 
reformation — to point to the fact that nitrogen and phosphates can 
be purchased for less than half the money that they cost in the days 
when the apostles of agricultural science went forth to preach the 
salvation that lay in a better care of the natural manurial resources 
of the land. 
Not only have such half-admitted arguments as this tended to 
the perpetuation of carelessness, but the mind of the practical man 
has often revolted from the extravagant unreasonableness of too 
enthusiastic preachers. To take a well-remembered example, the 
late Mr. Mechi, whose genial modes of propagating popular agricul- 
tural science resulted in much real good, set to work to make a 
model farm — many readers of this Journal remember every corner 
of it — and part of his model system showed how farm-yard manure 
should be dealt with. The liquid-manure tanks were made to com- 
municate by pipes with the outlying parts of the farm, so that the 
liquid drainage from the feeding-boxes, <fcc., could be pumped 
into the field in which it might be required. This was charming — 
on a model farm ; but the expense of the plant necessary to carry 
out the idea was obviously out of all proportion to its utility. The 
