An Episode in the History of Manure: "To barren ground with toyle large meanour add."

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Of the many things that can be said about manure you can't say but can say about its chemical replacement is that it is made from fossil fuels and sucks good stuff from the soil and ultimately makes the farmland it is fertilizing unfarmable. That's what popped into my head when I bumped into this woodcut of a manure spreader while farming something else in the 1829 volume of The Journal of the Franklin Institute. It's a relatively simple improvement to a necessary and laborious job--adding the spreader made the application of manure far easier than have it slide through a jamable sluice in the bottom of a wagon, and certainly a lot easier and more thorough than spreading it by hand. 

And just for the fun of it I checked out "manure" int he OED, where it makes appearances in English beginning in the mid 16th century, and for the hundreds of years the word has been around it has a complicated spelling history (manoure, maynor, maynure, menar, menor,  menore, meynor,  maner, meanor,  meanour, manure, mainure,  manier, manner, mayner,  meanure, menure; maner,  mannor,  mainer,  manna, manner, mannur, manor, manuer; manar, pre-maner, mannor, mannour,  mannur,  manuire, manure,  manour, mainer; U.S. regional (southern) manyo). Here are two examples of early usage that have some poetic sense to them:

• 1664   J. Evelyn Sylva (1679) 10.   "To barren ground with toyle large meanour add."
• 1697   Dryden tr. Virgil Georgics ii, in tr. Virgil Wks. 85.   "In depth of Earth secure Thy cover'd Plants, and dung with hot Manure".

The term "Manure spreader" according to the OED comes into use around 1884, 55 years after this report--except of course this is called a manure "scatterer" which seems to imply less confidence than a "spreader:, though that may have come about due to the modesty of the inventor.