288 BULLETIN OF THE BUSSEY INSTITUTION. 
beneath the grass, and spread in a narrow stripe upon another 
part of the field. It was spread, namely, in a grass-grown dead 
furrow in the shade of a large stone building, where the grass was 
thin and miserable. But it was seen almost immediately that the 
strip of grass upon which the loam was scattered had begun to 
grow luxuriantly, and had taken on the deep green color which is 
so characteristic of the presence of active nitrogenous manures, 
and the good effects of , the application were visible throughout the 
entire season. Inasmuch as the original loam of the field had not 
received any application of dung for years, and that the amount of 
dung dropped upon the avenue was extremely small; since, more- 
over, the same kinds and amounts of chemical fertilizers had been 
applied in past years as a top-dressing both to the soil of the dead 
furrow and that of the loam-bed, and since the soil of the loam-bed 
had not received any application whatsoever of fertilizers for more 
than a year, although four or five cuttings of tall grass had been 
carried away from it; I was not a little surprised at the great 
activity of the nitrogen in the scattered loam. Since the loam was 
spread so thinly that it could hardly have acted as a mulch, the 
most plausible explanation of its activity was, that the bed of 
loam reposing upon loose gravel,* and so situated that it is 
thoroughly moistened by every fall of rain, is a natural nest of 
the organisms which cause nitrification. On transplanting a quan- 
tity of these organisms they induced fermentation in the soil of 
the dead furrow, to the manifest advantage of the vegetation there 
situated. 
All this is, of course, nothing more than happens when a well- 
fermented, thoroughly-rotted peat compost is applied to the land ; 
and the growth of the nitric ferment in such compost explains 
the riddle of Lord Meadowbank, who found long ago that one part 
of dung is sufficient to bring three or four parts of peat into a 
state in which it is fitted to be applied to the land as if it were 
itself manure. - 
In the same sense may be explained also an expression of the 
Parisian gardeners, who, as Boussingault f tells us, use some part 
of the well-rotted compost (terreaw), prepared for their forcing- 
beds, as a top-dressing for grass in pleasure-grounds, and say that 
the purpose of it is to compost (terreauter) the sod. 
September, 1879. 
* Bussey Bulletin, 1. 80. 
+ In his ‘‘ Agronomie, Chimie Agricole et Phisiologie,” Paris, 1861, 2. 12. 
