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Updated: May 8, 2025
If this limestone is burned and brought in that state to the fields, it must be a perfect substitute for bones, the efficacy of which as a manure does not depend, as has been generally, but erroneously supposed, upon the nitrogenised matter which they contain, but on their phosphate of lime.
Nothing then can be more certain than the fact, that an exportation of nitrogenised products does not exhaust the fertility of a country; inasmuch as it is not the soil, but the atmosphere, which furnishes its vegetation with nitrogen.
The produce of nitrogen in clover and peas, which agriculturists will acknowledge require no nitrogenised manure, is far greater than that of a potato or turnip field, which is abundantly supplied with such manures. Lastly. On a morgen of meadow-land, we obtain in plants, containing silex, lime, and potash, 984 carbon, 32.2 nitrogen.
The method by which it is obtained sufficiently proves that it is insoluble in water; although we cannot doubt that it was originally dissolved in the vegetable juice, from which it afterwards separated, exactly as fibrine does from blood. The second nitrogenised compound remains dissolved in the juice after the separation of the fibrine.
It is found in the greatest abundance in certain seeds, in nuts, almonds, and others, in which the starch of the gramineae is replaced by oil. The third nitrogenised constituent of the vegetable food of animals is vegetable caseine. It is chiefly found in the seeds of peas, beans, lentils, and similar leguminous seeds.
If we add the carbon and nitrogen of the leaves of the beetroot, and the stalk and leaves of the potatoes, which have not been taken into account, it still remains evident that the cultivated fields, notwithstanding the supply of carbonaceous and nitrogenised manures, produced no more carbon and nitrogen than an equal surface of meadow-land supplied only with mineral elements.
We can suppose that asparagin, the active constituent of asparagus, the mucilaginous root of the marsh-mallow, the nitrogenised and sulphurous ingredients of mustard-seed, and of all cruciferous plants, may originate without the aid of the mineral elements of the soil.
The formation of the constituent elements of blood, that is, of the nitrogenised principles in our cultivated plants, depends upon the presence of inorganic matters in the soil, without which no nitrogen can be assimilated even when there is a most abundant supply.
The unprofitable exertion of power, the waste of force in agriculture, in other branches of industry, in science, or in social economy, is characteristic of the savage state, or of the want of knowledge. In accordance with what I have already stated, you will perceive that the substances of which the food of man is composed may be divided into two classes; into nitrogenised and non-nitrogenised.
Those plants, in which all the nitrogen may be said to be concentrated in the seeds, as the cerealia, contain on the whole less nitrogen than the leguminous plants, peas, and clover. The produce of nitrogen on a meadow which receives no nitrogenised manure, is greater than that of a field of wheat which has been manured.
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