Much of this is doubtless taken up as nitrate, yet the direct application of nitrate of soda has comparatively little beneficial influence on their growth.
Besides wool, leading imports are jute, cotton, flax, timber, petroleum, coal, pitch, wine, cereals, oil-seeds and oil-cake, nitrate of soda and other chemical products, and metals.
It exports iodine and immense quantities of nitrate of soda obtained from the desert region of the province.
It has been found by experiment that the nitrogen needed by practically all farm crops except leguminous ones is best supplied in the form of a nitrate; the rapid effect of nitrate of soda when used' as a top dressing to wheat or other plants is well known to farmers..
Hydrated sulphates occur at several localities in the province of Madrid and in other provinces of Spain, and at Miihlingen in Aargau, and copious deposits of glauberite, the double sulphate of sodium and calcium, are met with in the salt-mines of Villarrubia in Spain, at Stassfurt, and in the province of Tarapaca, Chile, &c. A native nitrate of soda is obtained in great abundance in the district of Atacama and the province of Tarapaca, and is imported into Europe in enormous quantities as cubic nitre for the preparation of saltpetre.
