Excerpt from Fertility of Soils as Affected by Manures The use of manures as a means of increasing the growth of crops dates back to ancient times. At the time of the discovery of America, the North American Indians used dead, fish as a manure for corn. The Peruvians have used guano since the beginning of their recorded history, and the Chinese have long recognized the value of all kinds of excrements as fertilizers. In the early part of the last century De Saussure established the existence of the mineral constituents Of the' soil in plants, and while he believed that they Were essential to the life of plants, his contemporaries regarded them as nonessential, or at the best useful only as a kind of Stimulant. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.