The practice of manuring reaches back into times of which we have no reliable records. The use of animal excreta for centuries formed the basis of the manurial side of husbandry. Even what is called artificial manuring is not as new-fangled as might be thought. The diarist John Evelyn speaks of the use of blood, hair, feathers, fish and malt residues as being used for crop improvement in the middle of the seventeenth century and other writers at the same time refer to rags, wool combings, bones of animals and fish, horn parings, hoofs, soot and wood ashes.