must have said, “the excreta of birds which feed upon a limited range of food cannot be so rich in manurial qualities as that of the human race within whose alimentary range all the edible products of earth are brought.” The thought was so simple, and withal so true, that he felt almost inclined to place it among the class of grand principles which are very well to enunciate, but which are difficult to reduce to practice. At all events, for years the public mind has done little more than dwell upon the problem, whilst those interested in our imported and manufactured manures have been active in throwing discredit upon the idea, whilst they have been equally active in despatching fleets to the other side of the globe to fetch guano, and factories have been arising on every hand to mix composts infinitely inferior to that mixed for us in our house drains, and which Lord Palmerston has truly designated as only matter in the wrong place. Whilst vested interests, however, have to a certain extent smothered the general idea floating in the public mind, and while, indeed, some public experiments, such as those at Rugby and Croydon, conducted on false principles, tended to discourage the belief in the new-found treasure, the efforts of individual minds have restored the problem to its original position.
With Englishmen an ounce of fact is worth a ton of theory; and when men began to see, here and there throughout the island, fields producing four and five crops of grass a year of astounding weight and quality, and when the land itself became quadrupled in value, it was natural to inquire how the thing was done. Inquiry once stimulated, the battle was won; and now that a Parliamentary Committee have reported highly favourably of the agricultural value of the excreta of man in great cities, we think we may safely predict that in England, at all events, the time is near at hand when we shall no longer trouble the booby and other sea-fowl in the South Pacific Ocean. It is certainly a most remarkable fact, that when we have to announce any new discovery, or to refer to any ancient one which has greatly affected mankind, we have to acknowledge the Chinese as the earliest originators. Printing, gunpowder, the mariner’s compass, and half a dozen other great inventions were well known in the flowery land long before this island had emerged from barbarism. But it seems stranger still to add that the simple expedient by which one of the largest empires—counting upwards of 400,000,000 inhabitants—possesses, and has possessed for hundreds of generations, the most productive soil in the world, should only just now be known amongst our sharper-witted farmers. If, according to a new theory, a slow exhaustion of the vegetable mould were really going on, we ought certainly to look to China for the strongest evidence of the fact; but mother earth is as strong there, possibly stronger, than she has been for a couple of thousand years, and the secret of this eternal vigour lies in this, that the inhabitants never fail to return to the soil those materials that they have taken out of it. Every morning the market gardener, who brings the day’s supply of vegetables, takes away the sewage of the house. It may not seem very savoury to our ideas to find the produce and the producer thus nakedly and perpetually brought into contact before our eyes; but it is in this rapid circulation of the fertilising agent that the whole secret of the wonderful productions of this vast empire is based. The western nations build magnificent cities which they undermine with a vast swamp of filth;—hence the plagues of the middle ages, which, like sudden floods, depopulated cities, and the slow fevers, which at the present day make their constant lairs in our crowded courts and alleys.
We have had constant intercourse with China for upwards of a hundred years, but it is only lately that travellers have made us acquainted with this one great feature in their industrial life, which doubtless lies at the foundation of a civilisation which reaches without intermission long before the so-called Historic period.
But we must not be surprised at our blindness to foreign example, when we find that we have equally shut our eyes to an experiment that has been going on for upwards of two hundred years in our own island. When the advantage of sewage manure is referred to, the Craigintenny meadows, near Edinburgh, are named as the exemplar. At present, there are upwards of two hundred acres irrigated with the flow of the sewage of about 80,000 of the population. This land receives the sewage from the western part of the city, and after flowing over the meadows it falls into the sea. Some portion of this pasture, being in fact little better than a prolongation of the sea-beach, was originally worth five shillings an acre—it is now worth 30l. an acre. This transmutation of desert land into pasture, off which as many as five crops have been taken in a year, yielding on some extraordinary occasions upwards of sixty tons per acre at one cutting, but averaging say twenty-five tons, is accomplished at an expense to the proprietor of not more than one pound per acre for the labour in irrigating. This process is very simple; the sewage flows by its own gravity over the whole surface, not continuously, but at certain seasons, and in certain conditions of the Italian rye grass crops, each acre receiving about 9000 tons at each watering, which takes place about ten or twelve times a year. It must be admitted that the extraordinary success of these meadows is owing to the favourable lie of the land, which prevents the necessity for pumping arrangements; but there are scores of towns in England as favourably situated as Edinburgh for delivering their sewage at a mere nominal expense. Yet this extraordinary example has been in some unaccountable manner overlooked. It is just possible that the vast amount of sewage per acre here employed has tended to make agriculturists doubt the possibility of applying this kind of manure profitably in other places; but there is no necessity for these heavy dressings, they are employed on these meadows as a matter of necessity rather than of choice, for the sewage must be got rid of, and this can only be done by passing it over the land into the sea. The great value of the present Report is the conclusion it comes to, that light dressings at infrequent intervals succeed admirably. The importance of this fact cannot be too highly esti-