ON THE USE OF AMMONIA IN HORTICULTURE. 
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To write specially of the kind under notice—Wilmot’s Prince Arthur, the following is the 
method of culture we should pursue:—Having procured the plants, we should pot them im¬ 
mediately into four inch pots, in a good rich compost, and place them in a shady situation, 
under a frame. Through the winter we would protect them ; and, about the end of February, 
introduce them into a forcing house, divesting them of their flowers, if they produced any, but 
encouraging them to make runners; these we would lay into small pots as they were produced, 
and thus, by midsummer, we should expect to get several hundred strong established plants, 
which, under proper management, would form a bed for bearing in the following year, of no 
mean importance. This is one of the most prolific kinds we have ever met with ; and, planted 
one foot apart, as recommended by Mr. Wilmot, we quite agree that it will produce more 
fruit than any kind in cultivation. To those who require late Strawberries, and to gardeners 
in the country who have to send their fruit to London, or a distance, this will be found a very 
valuable kind; and, when fairly tested, we have no doubt this variety will become a general 
favourite.—A. 
ON THE USE OF AMMONIA IN HORTICULTURE.* 
1#HE labours of modern chemists have shown us, and it is one of their grandest discoveries, that it 
A is the Azote to which manures owe all their value, and that their fertilizing properties are just in 
proportion to the quantity of this agent they contain. It is not always in its form of a simple body 
that this gas is useful; it can only be absorbed by plants in combination with hydrogen, that is to say, 
in the condition of ammonia. It has also been satisfactorily demonstrated that the atmosphere is the 
grand source or medium from whence vegetables derive this substance. Hence the great utility of 
cultivated plants being trenched in the soil, especially if these plants are such as easily give off their 
azote to mix in the atmosphere rather than in the soil. Leguminous plants, for instance, are very 
suitable in this respect; and long experience rather than the teachings of science, has taught agri¬ 
culturists to economize the plants of this family, to enrich the ground which has been exhausted by 
excessive cropping. Chemistry, properly speaking, has not made this discovery, but it has elucidated 
and justified a practice long in use. 
It may be interesting to investigate the causes which perpetually hold in the atmosphere the quan- 
tity of ammonia necessary for the development of vegetables, and which repair without ceasing the 
losses which they sustain. According to the researches of many chemists, and particularly those of 
M.M. Boussingault and Leibig, these causes are two in number. The one which is the most direct is 
the decomposition of organized bodies, which, without exception, contain a greater or less quantity 
of azote. All vegetables contain it, but it is particularly in the bodies of animals that this agent is 
condensed. It enters extensively into the composition of their organs, and when, after death, these 
animals are left to the chemical action of nature, all the elements of which they are constituted sepa¬ 
rate, and immediately form new, and, for the greater part, gaseous compounds, and among others the 
ammonia, which returns to the atmosphere, where it soon dissolves in the watery vapour with which 
the ah is always charged. 
The second productive cause of atmospheric ammonia has been much less studied, and it is only 
within a few years that its existence has been suspected. It is known to reside in the electric dis¬ 
charges which succeed one another in the air, at least in certain portions of the globe. It is the 
opinion of Boussingault as well as of the celebrated Leibig, that the carbonate of ammonia must pre¬ 
exist in all organized beings. “The phenomenon of the constancy of thunder-storms,” says M. 
Boussingault in his treatise on Rural Economy, “would seem to justify this opinion. It is said, indeed, 
that every time a series of electric flashes pass in the humid atmosphere, there is a production and 
combination of nitric acid and ammonia. The nitrate of ammonia, besides, always accompanies the 
rain which falls in a thunder-storm ; but this acid being fixed in its nature cannot be maintained in a 
state of vapour. When we consider the reactions which take place between the different compounds 
in question, it may easily be conceived that the nitrate of ammonia which is drawn to the earth by 
the rain, and which comes in contact with the rocks or calcareous soil, is afterwards volatilised to the 
state of carbonate at the next drying of the soil. In such a climate as France, where thunder-storms 
are rare, we should perhaps scarcely attach so much importance to the electricity of the clouds ; but, 
between the tropics, the electric discharges which take place in the atmosphere are almost incessant, 
* From the Revue Horiicole . 
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