840 The Conservation of Farm-yard Manure. 
Of potash salts, the cheapest and most suitable, as Holdefleiss 
observes, is kainit, which can, like superphosphate, be bought of any 
manure merchant, costing, generally, about 2s. 6 d. per cwt. 
But on a large proportion of our English farms, viz., those on 
fairly strong and well-tilled clay lands, the cheapest agent for pre- 
venting loss from the muck-heap is the one to which preference 
would be given, and that is ordinary earth. Let the manure be 
stored on a good bed of dry earth, and protected from the weather 
by a good roofing layer of the same simple material. 
Bernard Dyer. 
YEW POISONING. 
Sometime between the evening of Saturday, November 18, 1893, 
and the early morning of November 19 some eight or nine yearling 
Shorthorn cattle belonging to me here (Sarsden House, Chipping 
Norton, Oxon,) got into a garden containing yew-bushes. Before 
daybreak they were turned out. Unfortunately the man who 
evicted them, not thinking about the chances of poisoning, said 
nothing about the matter till the evening of the 19tb. , 
At 2.30 p.m. a man, passing the field in which the animals were, 
saw one of them fall down dead. Before that time they had been 
seen both by my bailiff and by myself, and appeared to be perfectly 
well. Between 7 and 8 o’clock on the morning of November 20 a 
second animal died. On the following morning it was found that 
two more had died in the night. 
By mistake the first animal was buried without a post-mortem 
examination. On opening the second we found that the animal had 
eaten yew and box. An examination of the garden showed that a 
considerable quantity of yew had been eaten, also some box, and 
two little bits of Cupressus Lawsoniana. In all the cases that 
had previously come within the experience of my bailiff and myself 
a much shorter time elapsed between the poison being taken and 
death. I am unable to say when the yew was eaten in this case, 
but it must have been before 7 a.m. on November 19. The first 
animal died 7^ hours after, the second died 25 hours after, and the 
third and fourth after a much longer lapse of time. Two others 
were ill, but recovered. 
The plants are not very old, perhaps about 20 years. It is 
curious that in the field adjoining the garden are three very old yew- 
trees. These I have always looked upon as sources of danger, but in 
the three years I have been farming here they have done no harm, nor 
does inquiry show that they ever have done any. I have often won- 
dered whether soil has any effect on the poisoning power of the yew ; 
the present case seems to disprove this idea. I am unable to state 
the sex of the bushes that did the mischief. As there were five or 
six, probably they were of both sexes, though, of course, it is quite 
possible that only one sex did the deadly work. In the churchyard 
