Note 84 — CANTO III. MANIFESTO.

Who make, quoth Darwin, good manure.

Besides the advantage of showing how reverently this great philosopher and philanthropist could speak of religion, I am sure I shall render an essential service to agriculturists, by adducing the following quotation. I bring it forward the more readily, as I find that the Board of Agriculture have been so negligent of the interest of that noble art, as not yet to have recommended the universal adoption of this measure.

“There should be no burial places in churches, or churchyards, where the monuments of departed sinners shoulder God’s altar and pollute his holy places with dead men’s bones. But proper burial places should be consecrated out of towns, and divided into two compartments, the earth from one of which, saturated with animal decomposition, should be taken away once in ten or twenty years for the purposes of agriculture, and sand or clay, or less fertile soil brought into its place.” Darwin’s Phytologia, p. 242.

Here your worships will perceive that there is a prospect, if this advice is followed, that we may enjoy the privilege of eating, instead of drinking our friends, which would be something of an improvement on our idea, communicated in page 58.