THE SOIL AS AN ECONOMIC FACTOR. 549 



case be largely an out-of-door life, and attractive to any one who has 

 the least spark of the love of nature in his soul. 



It would unquestionably be a most interesting and fruitful line of 

 investigation for the sociologist to study the causes which are apparently 

 diverting men from this most attractive field of labor. There are some 

 popular conceptions upon this subject, we know. It is generally ad- 

 mitted that there is a tendency for men to congregate in the cities 

 or the to"WTis in preference to remaining in the country, and various 

 reasons are assigned for it. We hear much in this connection of the 

 gregarious instinct of man, but this is hardly a sufficient reason. For 

 the entire trend of modern scientific agriculture is towards intensive 

 cultivation, and the gregarious instinct should be sufficiently gratified 

 in populations where this method prevails. On the other hand, it is 

 sometimes held that the chances for development in a social sense are 

 greater in other professions or occupations, such as business life, and 

 these are having their effect upon the youth of the country. This may 

 be true to some extent, for it is as natural for man to prefer fine clothes 

 as it is for birds to prefer fine feathers, and the accepted garb of the 

 farmer is certainly not as attractive to mankind at large as the every- 

 day costume of the physician, clergyman or clerk. But that it can 

 be as potent as it is generally believed scarcely seems probable, unless 

 one is to accept the notion that the farming class, speaking in a broad 

 way, is no more intelligent than the class from which the average 

 servant girl of the city comes. 



The opportunities for the development of special lines in agriculture 

 and soil management are certainly as great and should be as attractive 

 as in other professions. There is as great an opportunity for the de- 

 velopment of experts in sugar-beet-raising, apple-raising, rose-raising, 

 as for the development of specialists in eye, ear and throat treatment, 

 corporation law or criminal procedure, mechanical engineering or elec- 

 trical engineering, etc., and with this unusual knowledge and unusual 

 ability along specialized lines will come also the unusual pecuniary 

 emoluments that are found in other professions. 



Many problems of a sociological or economic nature suggest them- 

 selves in this connection, and it is certainly not from lack of subjects 

 or material that the literature is nearly barren. But the object of this 

 paper is to call attention to this subject, rather than to discuss it, 

 which must be left for abler and better fitted pens. The development 

 of new countries, as influenced by the soils, such as in the case of 

 the westward movement from the tide-water regions of the Atlantic 

 slope, along the limestone belt of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, 

 Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio; the differences which do, and must 

 of necessity, exist between communities practising intensive or ex- 

 tensive methods of cultivation; the land-rich and money-poor man, 



