THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 119 



Cicero writes of the pleasures of old age, that of agriculture is 

 chief among them. To dig in the mellow soil — to dig moder- 

 ately, for all pleasures should be taken sparingly — is a great 

 thing. One get strength out of the ground as often as one 

 touches it with a hoe. Antaeus was no doubt an agriculturist 

 and such a prize fighter as Hercules couldn't do anything with 

 him till he got him to lay down his spade and quit the soil. It 

 is not simply potatoes and beets and corn and cucumbers that 

 one raises in his well-hoed garden ; it is the average of human 

 life. There is life in the ground ; it goes into the seeds ; and 

 it also, when it is stirred up, goes into the man who stirs it. 

 The hot sun on his back as he bends to his shovel and hoe, or 

 contemplatively rakes the warm and fragrant loam is better 

 than much medicine. — Charles Dudley Warner. 



The Living Soil. — The facts that go to prove that the 

 soil is not an inert mass of rock particles are steadily increas- 

 ing. The longer we study the humus, the decaying particles 

 of vegetable matter without which no soil can be fertMe, the 

 greater becomes the list of animal and plant forms inhabiting 

 it. Here we find organisms that store nitrogen in the soil and 

 others that remove it, organisms that turn the starch in fallen? 

 leaves into sugar to be reabsorbed by the plant, organisms that 

 produce the nodules on the roots of legumes, organism? that 

 sustain other symbiotic relations with the higher plants and 

 still others that prey upon all the others. Once it was thought 

 that the fertility of the soil depended upon the amount of cer- 

 tain minerals in it ; now it seems probable that there is sufficient 

 minerals for many crops and that the determining factors ''n 

 fertility are these lowly members of the plant and ani nal kmg- 

 doms. 



