1850. 
THE CULTIVATOR. 197 
It remained frozen till spring, when it was sown; 
the produce was a red spring wheat, which had 
been continued in his neighborhood until this day. 
This experiment convinced him that all wheat was 
of one species, and that varieties might be origina¬ 
ted by causes unusually affecting the germ or the 
plant. 
Lieut. Gov. Patterson had no reason to doubt 
the result of the experiment just cited ; it brought to 
his mind the long-contested point of the transmuta¬ 
tion of wheat into chess. He had known chess 
produced under circumstances which seemed to favor 
that hypothesis. He knew a piece of new land, 
just cleared from the forest, at a considerable dis¬ 
tance from any other cleared land, sown to wheat, 
and on a swale, in the middle of the piece, there 
was scarcely anything grown but chess. 
Mr. Lawrence said he could not believe that a 
grain of wheat ever produced chess. All the cases 
of supposed transmutation that he had ever heard 
of, could be explained without resorting to such an 
unnatural idea. It was sometimes said that clean 
wheat was sown, and it produced chess. He had 
often examined wheat that was called clean, and 
found chess enough among it to produce all that 
was grown among the wheat. In wet places the 
wheat would die out, but the chess would grow all the 
better, and people were astonished at the quantity. 
Mr. -, (whose name we did not learn,) 
made some remarks in regard to smut. He had 
sown a piece of ground with seed wheat that was 
a little smutty, but scarcely enough to be noti¬ 
ced—did not apply lime or anything to prevent 
smut, and the crop was two-thirds smut. His son 
sowed some of the same seed, prepared by soaking 
in brine, and then limed, and the crop had hardly 
any smut in it. He inquired whether this accorded 
with general experience. Several gentlemen re¬ 
plied that they had never been troubled with smut 
when the seed was treated with lime, alkali, or 
vitriol. 
■Neglected Jltatroves—SNo. 6. 
Blood, Flesh, Animal Charcoal, Glue Refuse, Coal 
Ashes, Adulterated Manures. 
Analytical Laboratory, Yale College, ) 
Nevj-Haven , Conn., May, 1850. J 
Eds. Cultivator —In my last letter, I called at¬ 
tention to several powerful manures, remarkable for 
the large quantity of nitrogen which they contained ; 
there are quite a number more of the same class that 
are valuable, and I will select two or three of them. 
One of the most efficacious and energetic manures 
known, is to be found in flesh, of every description. 
Under this head, I include the blood, as that has 
nearly the same composition as the flesh. They 
both contain some 15 per cent, of nitrogen; owing 
to this, and to the quantity of water which enters 
into their composition, every form of flesh and blood 
is strongly disposed to speedy putrefaction. This 
is seen in the flesh of animals, and of fishes after 
death, especially whenever the temperature of the 
air is a little elevated. 
This facility of decay, although it has its disad¬ 
vantaged, causes them to produce an immediate ef¬ 
fect when applied as manures. In France, blood is 
dried and sold in the form of cakes; these if kept 
dry, will remain unchanged for a long period. The 
same thing may be accomplished with flesh, but on¬ 
ly at the expense of much time and trouble. There 
are few farmers but have seen the remarkable effect 
produced by some small dead animal, when buried 
under a vine or young tree, or under a portion of 
some growing crop. It pushes the plant rapidly 
forward, makes its foliage luxuriant, and of a dark 
green, healthy color. On thefield of Waterloo, the 
huge graves which were indiscriminately filled up 
with men and horses, were distinctly marked out 
for years, by the superior luxuriance, and the vivid 
green color of the grain which grew over them. 
Facts tending to a similar conclusion, as to the 
great value of these manures, abound in almost eve¬ 
ry section of the country, and yet for the most part 
they are entirely neglected. If a horse, or cow, or 
sheep dies, it is drawn out to some lonely place, 
where the crows and dogs soon make away with its 
flesh. This is not, I am aware, true of all places j 
I know of some regions where they are too wise to 
throw away such rich manures, where animal flesh, 
fish refuse, See., is eagerly sought after; these are 
not, however, the majority. 
I have been told of a case near the capital city 
of one of our largest states, where the offal from 
the slaughter houses, was allowed to accumulate 
year after year, in a hollow, down the bank of 
which it was thrown. The farmers would not pay 
for it even so much as six cents per load, and many 
of them would not take it away for the mere expense 
of cartage. This mass of material would have 
brought from $5 to $15 per ton, in England, and 
would have been eagerly sought for at that price. 
When manures of this class cannot be used imme¬ 
diately. they should be made into compost, by mix¬ 
ing with large quantities of some absorbent mate¬ 
rial ; if this mixture is sprinkled over with gypsum 
occasionally, nearly all escape of valuable substan¬ 
ces may be prevented. 
Another valuable manure, which owes much of 
its efficacy to blood, is to be found in the refuse ani¬ 
mal charcoal, or bone black, of the sugar refiners. 
Some refiners now employ gelatinous alumina large¬ 
ly for purifying sugar, in place of blood, but where 
the latter is used, the worth of the manure is great¬ 
ly increased. The use of alumina deteriorates it. 
Various valuable substances besides blood are pre¬ 
sent, as the impurities of the sugar, and usually 
some gypsum also ; the animal charcoal itself is sim¬ 
ply burned bone's crushed to a powder. We have 
then in this refuse, an abundance of nitrogen in the 
blood, and of phosphates in the bones, the two most 
important essentials for a good manure. It is worth 
$5 to $10 per ton, in England and France; in this 
country, it has been almost given away, so far as 
my experience of its use has extended. 
In the yards of glue factories, a refuse accumu¬ 
lates. which is in England called scutch. It con¬ 
sists of variable proportions of animal matter, hair, 
&c., mixed with lime, this last partly as phosphate. 
This substance has an exceedingly offensive smell, 
and is largely used by the farmers. It varies a good 
deal in its composition. Prof. Way, chemist to the 
Royal Ag. Society, has lately examined several sam¬ 
ples, and considers them worth from $5 to $6 per 
ton. This manure then, would not bear a long 
transportation, but would be valuable to farmers 
near the glue works. 
The English and Scotch farmers, have in their 
zeal for refuse manures, gone in many cases to the 
opposite extreme; and have paid large sums for va¬ 
rious substances because they were refuse, and 
seemed cheap, which turned out to be almost value¬ 
less. Prof. Way gives some instances of this kind; 
one of these is so remarkable that 1 will insert it 
here. It was an artificial manure or mixture, sold 
as remarkably adapted to the turnep crop, and 
greatly puffed as made from cheap refuse substances. 
