Reading Notes

- In a profit society, a dead soldier may well be worth more than a  live one. In "1493" by Charles C. Mann, he writes on the agrarian revolution taking place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the desperate need for fertilizer, " At the time, the best known soil additive was bone meal , made by pulverizing bones from slaughter houses. Bushels of bones went to grinding factories in Britain, France, and Germany. Demand ratcheted up, driven by fears of soil depletion. Bone dealers supplied the factories from increasingly untoward sources, including the recent battlefields of Waterloo and Austerlitz.'It is now ascertained beyond doubt, by actual experiment upon an extensive scale, that a dead soldier is a most valuable article of commerce,' remarked the London Observer in 1822." John Ayers.