THE CULTIVATOR. 
169 
Cream evaporated one fifth-part and put into bottles 
jafter having had the skin coagulated upon the surface 
removed from it, and then subjected to a second scald- 
|ing for an hour, has not been sensibly altered at the end 
jof two years. 
Those vegetables of which so much use ismade in all 
^families, may be preserved in the same manner; they 
I are, however, boiled a shorter time, and some of them! 
?must previously undergo a degree of preparation. For 
^instance, in preserving asparagus it is necessay, after! 
|having washed it, to plunge it first into boiling and then 
into cold water, to deprive it of its acrid taste; it after¬ 
wards receives but a slight scalding. 
To preserve the color of the small bush-beans, bot¬ 
tles filled with them are plunged into very cold water 
where they remain for an hour; they are then drawn 
|out,corked,wired, andscalded foranhour. Artichokes, 
The process consists, 
1st. In putting up, in glass jars or bottles, those solid 
or liquid substances which are to be preserved. 
2d. In corking the bottles carefully. 
3d. In placing these vessels upright in a boiler filled 
with cold water, as high as the ring of the bottles. 
4th. In causing the water to boil, and continuing the 
ebullition for a longer or shorter time, according to the 
nature of the substance contained in the vessels. 
In this process we see that nothing more is required 
than a boiler and some bottles or jars; it is one that 
may be practised in the smallest domestic establishment. 
In order however to avoid accidents and insure success, 
certain precautions in each part of the process are ne¬ 
cessary : the principal of these, especially those that 
are indispensable, I shall here point out. 
The choice of bottles is a matter of some consequence: 
the form of the champaigne bottles is the best, and asfgafter having had boiling water poured over them, are 
the glass of these is of a more uniform thickness than 
that of others, it is generally better annealed ; these bot¬ 
tles then should be preferred, particularly if they have 
proved their soundness by having resisted the action of 
the compressed air contained in foaming wine. 
Too much care cannot be taken in the choice of corks, 
only the superfine should be used, and these should be 
free from defects. The length of the corks should be at 
least eighteen or twenty lines, and the diameter a little 
greater than that of the mouth of the bottles, into which 
they must be forced by blows of a mallet. 
The bottles must be filled within three inches of the 
ring; the corks selected for them must be softened a lit¬ 
tle in water; in stopping a bottle, put the small end of 
the cork into the mouth of the bottle, and force it in as 
far as possible with the hand; then wrap the bottle in a 
towel, and, holding the neck of it firmly in the left hand,, 
drive the cork in by repeated blows with a mallet : a few | 
lines of the length of the cork must be left beyond the 
mouth of the bottle to receive the wire or twine with 
which it is to be secured. Each bottle is then to be put 
into a bag of strong linen, which will cover it to the cork, 
and placed in a boiler filled with water to the rings of 
the bottles. The boiler is to be covered, and over the lid 
must be placed a damp linen cloth, to secure the reten¬ 
tion of the heat. The apparatus being thus prepared, 
the water may be heated to boiling, and continued in 
that state as long as the nature of the substance to be 
preserved requires. 
When the fire has been removed from the fire-place a 
quarter of an hour, the water must be drawn off by means 
of a siphon, or of a stop-cock placed near the bottom of 
the boiler; the cover must not be removed to take out 
the bottles till fifteen minutes after the water has been 
drawn off.* 
When meat or other solid food is to be preserved, wide 
mouthed bottles or jars may be used in the same man¬ 
ner as the narrow-necked bottles mentioned above.— 
Good gravy of meat, and beef three-quarters cooked, 
when prepared according to the foregoing directions, 
have been found as good after being eighteen months at 
sea, as when first put up. Attention must be paid ini 
putting up solid articles in bottles, to pack them closely, 
in order that as little air as possible may interpose be¬ 
tween the pieces. Consommes, strong decoctions,f and! 
jellies of meat containing ail those portions of it most Sr 
may be thus preserved uninjured;; 
| washed in cold water, drained, and scalded in the bottles 
f.for an hour. Cauliflowers are prepared in the same 
Kvay as artichokes, excepting that they are boiled but 
: half an hour. Legumes in general, prepared and sea- 
|j soned, and put into bottles when three-quarters cooked, 
yjwill keep very well with being scalded twenty minutes. 
I Antiscorbutic plants, and the juices which are extract- 
led from all fruits and vegetables require only to be! 
|scalded. When juices are to be kept, they should be 
gcarefully strained and clarified; plants require to be well 
‘ washed, picked, and dried, and to be crowded into the 
bottles. When any of these preparations are made use 
jof, they should be dressed in such a manner as to give 
j|them the appearance of those prepared daily in our 
I kitchens. 
Those articles that have been cooked before being put 
uinto bottles, only require to be heated. 
The strong decoctions will need the addition of noth¬ 
ing but water to become good broth. 
| The jellies of beef, veal, mutton, chickens, &c. when 
^diluted with water, and seasoned with salt, make excel¬ 
lent soups. 
§ The legumes must be washed upon being taken from F 
the bottles, and then prepared as if fresh. 
The juices may be appropriated as usual, either for^ 
food, drink, or medicine. 
I shall close this article by observing, that some bo¬ 
dies are preserved from destruction, and guarded from 
Jthe attacks of insects, and the action of air and water, 
•by means of a coat of varnish laid upon the surface of 
them; this practice has become very common, and when 
Ithe varnish is applied to bodies well dried, and does not| 
|scale off, it preserves them a long time. Oil paints and 
tar produce the same effect. 
The custom of preserving eggs by immersing them 
in lime water has lately been introduced into Paris; the 
shell of the egg thus immersed becomes covered with 
a thin coat of lime, which preserves its contents un-^ : 
changed. 
I 
Memoir on the Classification of Soils.* 
BY M. DE GASPARIN. 
[From the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal .] 
It is undoubtedly a matter of surprise that in an art*, 
which engages the attention of so many distinguished 
men,—which is the great basis of national prosperity 
and which excites so many different energies, a name 
has not yet been devised for the expression of the diffe¬ 
rent qualities of earth which form the theatre and prin¬ 
cipal material in all its operations. Attempts have 
been made to confer upon it a nomenclature, one of the 
first requirements of a rising science ; but before success 
can be obtained, it must make the same attainments 
nourishing to man 
for a long time. 
Before milk is put into bottles for keeping, it should 
be evaporated in a water or vapor bath, and the scum 
which forms upon the top carefully removed ; half an 
hour before evaporation is completed, there should be 
mixed with every pint of the reduced milk, the yolk of 
an egg well beaten. After being thoroughly cooled the;® 
milk must be put into bottles, and corked tightly to un-lf, at t “ e ot * ler natural sciences have recently done. For 
dergo the second scalding. Milk preserved in this wayl the di ?c°very of the appropriate characters of his clas- 
has been found at the end of two years to be unchanged |||®i^-cation, the author has directed a pai ticular share ot 
and to afford butter and butter-milk the same as if iTew!B a ^ en ^ on 1:0 Chemistry and Natural Philosophy, to Mi- 
geroscopic Observation, Geology, and Botany; and the 
^ soils have been analyzed, experimented upon, and ob 
Iserved in relation to all these sciences. As it is impos-| 
|sible, in this place, to enter at length upon the conside 3 
Iration of these laborious researches, we must confine 
1 ourselves to the citation of some of the facts which re-S 
It is not however pretended, that it preserves all the qua-j; 
lities of new milk; it almost always has a peculiar odor| 
and taste, but such as it is, it forms an agieeable and ; 
valuable article for sea stores for long voyages. 
[* The translator of this work has preserved the most de¬ 
licate fruit by a process somewhat similar to the one here 
described, but with one pretty important difference. As the, 
preservation of the fruit seems to depend wholly upon the? 
exclusion of the air, which would not be effected by corking' 
the bottles before exposing them to heat, and as the bottles; 
would be in great danger of being burst by the expansion of 
the air contained not only in the fruits themselves‘but in the;, 
interstices which must unavoidably occur between them, thej 
above method appears to be an imperfect one; she therefore 
takes the liberty of inserting in this note the process which., 
she has used successfully, and particularly as she has found! 
fruit thus preserved exceedingly grateful in sickness at those 
seasons of the year when no fresh fruit could be procured 
and when that which was done with sugar was neither sui¬ 
table nor agreeable. 
Pick carefully over the fruit to be bottled so as to take on¬ 
ly such as is perfectly sound, and put it in bottles having 
wide mouths with closely fitting corks, shake the fruit well 
down so as to leave as little space unoccupied as possible in 
the bottles ; when they are quite full, set them uncorked 
into a boiler of cold water over the fire, raise the temperature 
of the water as quickly as possible to the boiling point, and 
as soon as ebullition takes place, put the corks into the bot¬ 
tles, and remove them from the boiler ; some ready melted;: 
cement, such as is commonly used for closing bottles, must' 
be immediately applied over the corks, and the fruit having- 
been freed by the heat from the air contained within the bot¬ 
tles will thus be protected from the action of the external 
air, and may be preserved fresh for many months.—Tr.j 
t Answering to “ portable soups.” 
suit from the investigation. 1st, The author points outL 
the small quantity of carbonate of lime which is suffi-| 
cient to change the character of soils. It is known thatf 
the five or six per cent of this substance which is sup¬ 
plied by marling, produces very remarkable effects, 
whilst the one-hundreth part which is contained in the 
soil of Lille, as analyzed by M. Berthier, likewise sen¬ 
sibly affects its nature and vegetative power. Lime gra¬ 
dually disappears from soils, being changed into a bi¬ 
carbonate. The enclosure of la grande Chartreuse , 
which is formed of the debris of rocks which contain 
lime, does not now furnish a single particle of this earth. 
2d, The carbonate of magnesia modifies soils in the same 
way as the carbonate of lime. This earth is contained 
in great quantities in the soils of the valley of the Nile; 
and those of Bas-Languedoc often furnish from eight to 
thirty-three per cent. 3d, It has often been attempted to 
ascertain the characters which distinguish those soils in 
which gypsum produces an effect upon vegetables, and 
those in which it has none; but hitherto without success. 
* Report of a communication presented to the French 
Academy of Sciences. This Memoir is the first part of a 
work upon Agronomy, which is that branch of the science 
of agriculture which has for its object the study of soils; 
what belongs to their susceptibility of cultivation, and to,, 
their relative value, is reserved for another publication, thej 
id author confining himself on the present occasion to the con-li 
y sideration of their classification. 
The author has ascertained that gypsum has no action 
upon recent alluvial soils, and that it produces a bene¬ 
ficial effect upon all more ancient soils, beginning with 
F the diluvian. 4th, He has found sal-ammoniac in all 
Ithe clays belonging to the vegetable stratum of soils.— 
’This observation shows the importance of clay as a ma¬ 
gazine of the materials which favor vegetation. 5th, 
If by washing we separate into several portions the coar¬ 
ser and finer parts of earth, we find that the tenacity of 
such soil is in proportion to the quantity of the latter 
kind, except in a small number of cases. 6th, Upon 
examination with the microscope, it is ascertained that 
these exceptions are owing to a coating of ferruginous 
clay which adheres to the surfaces of the mineral parti¬ 
cles,—that washing separates it with difficulty, and that 
it serves as a cement,forcibly agglutinating, and increas¬ 
ing the tenacity of the whole. 
On the Principles of the Classification of Soils. 
If we study the objects which we find in nature, that 
we may know them as they really are in themselves, 
under all the relations of their organization and their 
| properties, it is in their innermost existence,—in the re¬ 
lation of their parts,—in their resemblances and dissi¬ 
milarities, that we must seekfor the means of grouping 
them together, without any regard to the circumstances 
which are foreign to their peculiar and proper existence. 
It is thus that Jussieu established the several fami¬ 
lies of plants, Cuvier those of animals, and M. Beudant 
his orders of minerals. Each of their groups collects 
together the beings or the substances which bear the 
closest resemblance to each other, under all the appre¬ 
ciable relations of their organization or of their texture, 
but without intermingling therewith any idea concern¬ 
ing their utility, which could only be considered as fo¬ 
reign to the subject; and this forms pure natural his- 
tory. . ... 
But if we regard it in another point of view, if it be 
not the being or the substance in itself which we wish 
to study, but only such and such a property of the object, 
the classification then ceases to be a natural method or 
arrangement, and becomes a common classification.-— 
Accordingly, when we would study plants in an agri¬ 
cultural point of view, the consideration of families 
should not mislead us; as it would be impossible to es¬ 
tablish any one agricultural principle which would be 
common to an entire family. That of the Graminese, 
for example, presents us with oats, wheat, rice, and the 
sugar-cane, which require different cultures, and serve 
for very different purposes. Besides, the number of 
plants which are the objects of agricultural interest is 
I: small, and were we to conduct a course of agriculture, 
£ according to the order of families, we should have only 
shreds of these families, which, detached from their na¬ 
tural alliances, would exhibit nothing but disorder, so 
soon as the intermediate links were withdrawn which 
maintain the order of their connection. What, then, 
under these circumstances, is to be done? The answer 
is clear,—we must combine together the plants whose 
kind of cultivation has the greatest analogy, and we 
should thus have, for example, 1st, trees; 2d, the trees 
and shrubs which yield an annual crop (stmli as fruit- 
trees, mulberries, vines) ; 3d, the feculent grains (wheat, 
oats, buck-wheat, &c.) ; 4th, the plants with oily seeds 
(the poppy, colza) ; 5th, the plants which yield fodder 
(lucerne, spurry, ryegrass) ; 6th, plants used in weaving 
(lint, hemp) ; 7th, plants used in dyeing (dyer’s woad 
or glastum); 8th, the oleraceous plants (pot-herbs, spi- 
nage, chiccory) ; 9th, roots (beet, carrot, madder,) &c. 
&c. According to this method, classes are formed in 
which the natural affinities of plants are often broken, 
but which, on the other hand, present another kind of 
i| affinities, such as proceed from their mode of culture. 
They are, therefore, natural classes in relation to farm¬ 
ing, whilst they cease to be so considered in the light of 
natural history. This is a method which has been fol¬ 
lowed in regard to medical substances, articles of food, 
&c. Chemistry itself classes natural bodies in a man¬ 
ner different from what mineralogy does, because the 
view it takes of them is different. Thus, not only the 
practical arts, but the pure sciences themselves, modify 
classification, according to the object they have in view, 
without at all changing the natural relations of bodies; 
they determine that one of their properties which ought 
to predominate in the order they impose. 
In agronomy, therefore, it is no longer simple substan- 
ces, or bodies in their individual condition, such as a 
plant, or crystal, we have to examine; but it is mixtures 
of many of these substances, of which we form indivi¬ 
duals only by abstraction, as we do in rocks, formed as 
they aie by the union of many minerals. But this intel¬ 
lectual operation which regards the habitual union of 
several substances and forms from them one collective 
being, is much more natural in practice, than that which 
would consist in considering in granite only the three 
minerals which compose it, without regarding their ag¬ 
gregation ; and still more than that which, decomposing 
these minerals into their last chemical elements, would 
remove granite from mineralogy, and view it only as a 
compound of oxygen, silicium, aluminium, potassium, 
magnesium, and iron. It is thus too with soils, although 
some may present only a single mineral element, as for 
example, silex; and though others, as much oftener hap¬ 
pens, contain many, and these associated with vegetable 
and animal debris. We can consider abstractedly each 
of these mixtures as a pulverized rock, and deal with it, 
as we do with rocks, in forming a systematic xvhole. 
After having thus demonstrated that both reason and 
custom authorize us to propose a classification of soils 
with a special relation to agriculture, we may examine ; 
1st, what the characters are which agriculturists should 
