GOOD HUSBANDRY. 69 



soil and start vegetation into life, and now man has been created to 

 '^till the ground." 



"The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden," and He put 

 the man into the garden to "dress it and keep it." Do we ever 

 consider what this means, to dress it ? Many of our farmers of the 

 present day go about aud continue their business in utter disregard 

 of this first requirement. Had Adam taken off crop after crop, year 

 after year, without returning as much as he removed, it could not 

 be said he was dressing the garden ; in fact, he would have been 

 doing just what many of our Maine farmers are doing to-day, he 

 would have been undressing it, to use a homely but expressive term. 



Dressing a piece of land to " keep it," means to keep it up to its 

 normal standard of production ; that is, as much vegetable nutrition 

 must be returned as the cropping has removed. When you obligate 

 vourself to feed and clothe an individual for a term of years, we all 

 know what that means. AVhen you have given him a few meals, 

 and fitted him out with a suit of new clothes, he has been fed and 

 clothed to be sure, but not according to the meaning of the obliga- 

 tion, and nobody would so understand it or accept it. The person 

 requires food every day, and feeding him means Txeeping him fed ; 

 clothes wear out, aud clothing him means keej^inq him clothed. So 

 with the requirement made of Adam ; dressing the garden means 

 keeping it dressed, and the same injunction is as binding on us to-da}' 

 as it was on Adam six thousand years ago. 



When nothing is taken off. all soils are naturally self-sustaining ; 

 in other words, when everything the ground produces falls back and 

 decays where it grew, it returns to the soil every element removed 

 therefrom during the process of its growth, and so long as this contin- 

 ues, the soil will hold its own ; no fertility is or can be lost. 



But when the land is brought under cultivation, the farmer is con- 

 stanth' removing some of these elements in the several crops he is 

 taking off; and unless these materials, in some form or other, are 

 returned, the soil is just as surely losing its productive power as it 

 is that the sun shines, and as long as the exhaustive process of con- 

 tinued cropping goes on without adequate returns no soil can retain 

 its full productive power. 



The rich, mellow soil of Aroostook County is now producing re- 

 markably heavy crops, and may continue to do so for some years 

 without any perceptible diminution ; but the time will come when her 

 crops will fall off as they do in the older portions of the State, unless 



