FERTILITY OF SOIL. 117 



made provision for a rotation of crops in the natural produc- 

 tions of every fertile country, in the multitude of seeds, the 

 methods of their preservation and transportation, so that it 

 only requires a suitable soil to nourish them. Herbs once 

 abundant, give place to others of a different race ; forests of 

 hard wood are succeeded by evergreens. The nurseryman 

 whose highly cultivated ground has sustained for several 

 years young apple trees, without any more dressing applied 

 to the plat, sets out a new nursery of pines, spruces and 

 cedars, and has a flourishing growth of evergreens produced 

 for the market. The farmer alternates his grass and culti- 

 vated crops in order to retard the exhaustion of the soil. 

 When the first European settlers came to this State, the 

 plains of Brunswick were covered with spreading beech trees. 

 This growth exhausted the potash of the soil and was suc- 

 ceeded by a dense forest of hard pine, whose long tap roots 

 could penetrate deeper into the porous sand, and pump up 

 the elements required for plant food ; and as such a large 

 proportion of the potash in the growth of the pine goes to 

 the foliage, the accumulation of soil from the fallen needles 

 would in the course of years have rendered the soil sufficiently 

 fertile to supply all that is requisite for another hard wood 

 growth, had not man with his destructive axe and consuming 

 fire interfered in the process, and exhausted this accumulation 

 in cropping the land with wheat barley and oats, till now only 

 the scanty spear grass or humblest herbs can be sustained. 



Mechanical cultivation enriches the sail by supplying the 

 necessary physical conditions of plant growth, and promoting 

 the solution of those substances that feed the crops. It also 

 promotes the activity of those agents which bring into avail- 

 able form the supply that will be made by future demands on 

 the resources of the earth. Breaking up the compact mass 

 allows the air to permeate through the whole, and thus 

 furnishes the oxygen which attacks the inert materials. 

 Minute division of the soil brings into contact the substances 

 whose chemical affinities or repulsions set in action the great 

 laboratory of nature. The soil is thus rendered capable of 



