Manure
a term applicable to any material which may be used for acceler- MANZANILLO silver were the mediums, though from their cost they are oftenest confined to initial letters. With respect to external form, manuscripts are divided into rolls (volumina), and into stitched books or volumes (properly codices). Among the ancients the writers of manuscripts were mainly freedmen or slaves (scribæ librarii). At a later period the monks were largely engaged in the production of manuscripts. In all the principal monasteries was a scriptorium, in which the scriptor or scribe could pursue his work in quiet.
The most ancient manuscripts still preserved are those written on papyrus which have been found in Egyptian tombs. Several of these are of date considerably before the Christian era. Next to them in point of age are the Latin manuscripts found at Herculaneum.
Then there are the manuscripts of the imperial era of Rome, among which are the Vatican Terence and Septuagint, and the Alexandrine codex of the British Museum. Numerous manuscripts of the Old and New Testaments of the 2d and 3d centuries exist; and among those of profane authors may be noted that of Vergil (4th century), in the Laurentian Library at Florence; a Livy (5th century), in the Imperial Library of Vienna; the Jewish Antiquities of Josephus, in the Ambrosian Library, Milan, etc. It was a common custom in the Middle Ages to obliterate and erase writings on parchment, ating vegetation or increasing the production of plants. The cultivation of plants tends to exhaust the soil of its air food for the purpose of writing on the maand ash constituents. It becomes, there- terials anew, n manuscripts thus treated fore, necessary to replace these by addition of manure. This, to some extent, proceeds naturally by the absorption of air food by the soil in the form of ammonia and carbonic acid, and also by the decomposition of the mineral matter of the soil under the influence of time and tillage. The air food is supplied by nitrogenous matters, chiefly by ammoniacal salts, and the ash constituents by the use of salts of phosphoric acid and potash, in the form of preparations from bone or in the use of a mineral phosphate. Those substances which furnish both classes of food comprise guano, stable manure, fish, seaweed, artificial saline mixtures, etc.