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It is but little longer than a century and a quarter ago since Charles Stuart and Cumberland confronted each other over against us there; and here are the descendants of the men that fought in their tartans for the "King over the Water," who are discussing the right proportion of phosphates in artificial manures and of whom one asks me confidentially for my opinion on the Leger favourite.
Potash is essential to the manufacture of many fertilizers, fertilizer being composed as a rule of potash, phosphates and nitrates. The nitrates in past years have been exported to all countries from Chile. Phosphate rock is mined in South Carolina and Florida and several other places in the world. Curiously enough, both nitrates and potash are essential ingredients also of explosives used in war.
She arrives like sudden rain, like wind from a new quarter. She is as chance as the fall of a star. None knows the day nor the hour. At the most inconvenient time she takes the wonder's visitors to the back door. We went, light ship from the South, to Barbados, for orders; and because I wanted New York, for that was the way home, we were sent to Tampa for phosphates.
"The stable manure and insoluble phosphates here referred to were not applied together, but on separate plots.
If we compare the amount of the phosphates in different vegetable substances with each other, we discover a great variety, whilst there is scarcely any ashes of plants altogether devoid of them, and those parts of plants which experience has taught us are the most nutritious, contain the largest proportion.
We obtain daily, in the form of urea, all the nitrogen taken in the food both of the young and the adult; and further, in the urine, the whole amount of the alkalies, soluble phosphates and sulphates, contained in all the various aliments. Physiology teaches us, that the process of nutrition in animals, that is, their increase of bulk, or the restoration of wasted parts, proceeds from the blood.
It employs six thousand men; some of the mineral goes as far as Japan; the output of last year amounted to over a million tons. One may well be interested in the discoverer of these phosphates, in the man who has revolutionized the trade of Tunisia. He is a veterinary surgeon in the French Army Monsieur Philippe Thomas. His record is of the best.
"Germany imports great quantities of wheat, corn, oil cake, and phosphates, and thus enriches her cultivated soil, and Germany's principal export is two billion pounds of sugar, which contains no plant food of value, but only carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, secured from air and water by the sugar beet.
If, however, the ashes of food contain no alkaline phosphates, but abound in insoluble earthy phosphates, as hay, carrots, and potatoes, the urine will be free from alkaline phosphates, but the earthy phosphates will be found in the faeces. The urine of man, of carnivorous and graminivorous animals, contains alkaline phosphates; that of herbivorous animals is free from these salts.
His land after draining is full of the stuff for which he otherwise would pay thousands and thousands of dollars. Phosphates and lime form the coverings of minute swamp life and nitrogen compounds are a part of their bodies. The polders of Holland are not richer than this swamp land; indeed, they are not so rich.
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