dressing of one hundred pounds of Bone per acre than try to do without. But no lands recently brought into cultivation--no lands where the bones of the animals fed thereon have been allowed, for unnumbered years past, to mingle with the soil--can be equally hungry for Phosphates; and I doubt that any cotton-field in the South will ever return an outlay of even $50 per tun for any Phosphatic fertilizer whatever. That _any_ preparation of Bone, or whereof Bone is a principal element, will increase the succeeding crops, is undoubted; but that it will ever return its cost and a decent margin of profit, is yet to be demonstrated to my satisfaction. No doubt, there are special cases in which the application even of Peruvian Guano at $90 per tun is advisable. A compost of Muck, Lime, &c., equally efficient, might be far cheaper; but months would be required to prepare and perfect it, and meantime the farmer would lose his crop, or fail to make one. If a tun of Guano, or of some expensive Phosphate, will give him six or eight acres of Clover where he would otherwise have little or none, and he needs that Clover to feed the team wherewith he is breaking up and fitting his farm to grow a good crop next year, he may wisely make the purchase and application, even though he may be able to compost for next year's use twice the value of fertilizers for the precise cost of this. But I am so thorough in my devotion to "home industry," that I hold him an unskillful farmer who cannot, nine times in ten, make, mainly from materials to be found on or near his farm, a pile of compost for $100 that will add more to the enduring fertility of his farm than anything he can bring from a distance at a cost of $150. Understand that this is a general rule, and subject, like all general rules, to exceptions. Gypsum, I think every farmer should buy; Lime also, if his soil needs it; Phosphates in some shape, if past ignorance or folly has allowed that soil to be despoiled of them; Wood Ashes, if any one can be found so brainless as to sell them; Marl, of course, where it is found within ten miles; Guano very rarely, and mainly when something is needed to make a crop before coarser and colder fertilizers can be brought into a condition of fitness for use; but the general rule I insist on is this: A good farmer will, in the course of twenty or thirty years, make at least $10 worth of fertilizers for every dollar's worth he buys from any dealer, unless it be the sweepings or other excretions of some not distant city.