1270. The entire parts of the muscles of land animals are not commonly used as manure, though there are many cases in which such an application might be easily made. Horses, dogs, sheep, deer, and other quadrupeds that have died accidentally or of disease, after their skins are separated, are often suffered to remain exposed to the air, or immersed in water till they are destroyed by birds or beasts of prey, or entirely decomposed; and, in this case, most of their organised matter is lost to the land in which they lie, and a considerable portion of it employed in giving off noxious gases to the atmosphere. By covering dead animals with five or six times their bulk of soil, mixed with one part of lime, and suffering them to remain for a few months, their decomposition would impregnate the soil with soluble matter, so as to render it an excellent manure; and by mixing fresh burnt charcoal with it at the time of its removal, the disagreeable effluvia would be in a great measure destroyed, and it might be applied to crops in the same way as any other manure.
