BONE-MANURE. 
of a short time be opened, and the contents put 
into the magazine. Before being ground, they 
must be assorted in order to remove those pieces 
which have been burned white. The bones lose, 
on the average, from 40 to 50 per cent. In refer- 
ence to the quality as a decolourizing agent, ex- 
perience has shown that it is so much more 
powerful, as the bones from which it has been 
made were previously freed from adhering fatty, 
fleshy, and tendinous matters. Before being put 
into commerce as bone-black, the ignited bones 
are broken up into a coarse powder by being 
passed between two iron cylinders and sifted 
through two sieves, one to remove the small dust, 
and one with large meshes to separate the proper 
sized grains from the coarser lumps. Sometimes 
it is ground to fine powder in a mill. The fol- 
lowing is the average composition of common 
bone-black. 
Phosphate and carbonate of lime, 88 
Charcoal (nitrogenous), 10 
Carburet or siliciuret of iron, . 2 
Sulphuret of calcium or iron, trace 
100 
BONE-MANURE. Bones employed for fer- 
tilizing the soil. They have been applied in a 
very great variety of conditions and forms, raw 
and boiled, fresh and rotten, fermented and un- 
fermented, whole, broken, bruised, and powdered, 
digested in powerful solvents or reagents, reduced 
to incineration, and mixed in several conditions 
with various diluents and composts. 
Bone-manure began, long ago, to be used in 
the hothouses of Germany ; it became slowly 
known as.a fertilizer to the best informed class 
of English cultivators; it was at first tried, in 
this country, with hesitation, in obscurity, and 
under very bungling processes of management ; 
and it eventually acquired the fame of being one 
of the most facile and powerful appliances for 
enriching the fields of our cold and humid cli- 
mate. In some of the earliest farm applications 
of bone-manure in Great Britain, the bones were 
uniformly calcined or incinerated, and, in con- 
Sequence, deprived of oil, gelatine, and other 
matters which constitute a considerable portion 
of their fertilizing power; and, in others, they 
were broken by the hammer, or reduced by lime, 
or decomposed by urine, or distributed along the 
bottom of the farm-yard heap, or otherwise so 
prepared as either to occasion loss of their own 
virtues or a wasteful expenditure of labour. But 
when better methods of preparation were devised 
and ‘imtroduced to general practice, bones be- 
came suddenly recognised as both an economical 
and a most powerful manure ; and they acquired 
a celebrity nearly as great, and not one-fourth 
so factitious, as that which has since been ac- 
ceded to guano. 
Bones have, for many years past, been im- 
ported in large quantities from all the principal 
ports of the north of Europe; and, for some time, 
though in smaller quantities, from the south of 
473 
EKurope and even from South America. The 
only importations at first, and the principal im- 
portations for a considerable time afterward, 
were from Germany; and, when the bones from 
that country had brought the uplands of Not- 
tinghamshire, the western parts of Holderness, 
and some other originally poor districts, into a 
state of high cultivation and fertility, a proverb | 
arose, “ that one ton of German bone-dust saves 
the importation of ten tons of German corn.” 
As Malta formerly covered her naked rocks with 
soil from foreign lands, so England fertilized her 
barren clays and sandy heaths with bones from 
Germany. Most of the imported bones have 
never been boiled; a large proportion appear to 
have been buried in the earth or in composts 
till the soft parts have become detached; and 
some seem to have belonged to carcasses whose 
fleshy portions have decayed in the open air. 
The bones from some of the seaboard districts of 
Germany are partly the exhumations of burying- 
grounds,—the robbery of the repositories of the 
human dead being ironically excused by its ren- 
dering the bone trade popular; those from some 
other parts of Germany have been deprived of 
their gelatine, and appear to have been boiled 
for glue,—but these, though easily bruised and 
rapid in their action, are not much esteemed; 
those from Russia are reduced to a somewhat 
bruised state, partly that they may occupy less 
room in stowage, and partly that they may com- 
port with a Russian law which forbids their ex- 
portation unless they be more or less manu- 
factured; those from the south of Hurope are 
drier, more brittle, more reducible to fine pow- 
der, and capable of a more uniform distribution 
in the soil than those from the north, but at the 
same time more rapid in their action and less 
durable in their power; and those which are 
collected in our own large towns are, in all re- 
spects, the best which can be obtained, but are 
far too meagre in quantity to meet more than a 
small fractional portion of the existing demand. 
In a report on agricultural produce and shipping, 
which was printed by order of the House of Com- | 
mons in February 1842, statistics are given of 
eleven ports of the northern countries of Conti- 
nental Hurope; and two of these ports were 
found to export no bone-manure to Great Bri- 
tain, Hamburgh made exportations to a large but 
unascertained amount, and Rotterdam, Bremen, 
Lubeck, Kiel, Rostock, Stettin, Elsinore, and 
Dantzic, annually exported, in the aggregate, 
13,084 tons. 
“ Bone-dust,” said Mr. Shier in 1844, “is much 
used all over Scotland, but in no district so uni- 
versally as in Aberdeenshire and the adjoining 
counties, where it is for the most part applied in 
supplement to farm-yard manure in growing 
turnips. During the year from lst June 1840 
to Ist June 1841, there were imported into Aber- 
deen from foreign ports 4,3555 tons, and on the 
average of the last six years, 3,461 tons annually, 
