INFLUENCE OF WATER. 253 



Have you not in old Plymoiitli County sandy lands ■which 

 can be made fertile simply by the application of water? 

 Certainly you have. Then the question conies, How does 

 water act to make land more fertile? To sec how Avater 

 acts, I again ask your attention to the action of different 

 kinds of plants. Plants arc very peculiar in their structure 

 and in their adaptation according to their kind or variety. 

 Let me illustrate. I put wheat upon a given field, and grow 

 it year after 3'ear, and year after year, until it is so nearly 

 exhausted, that I cannot get a paying crop. It gives me five 

 or six bushels of wheat to the acre. It does not pa}'-, and I 

 change it. I put on rye ; and, where the wheat gave me six 

 bushels to the acre, the rye gives me twelve, and that is a 

 paying crop. Now, then, in their composition, rye and 

 wheat are almost alike. The crop of twcWe bushels of rye, 

 with its straw, carried away from the land double the nitro- 

 gen, double the phosphoric acid, double the potash and lime, 

 that the crop of wheat did. Pray tell me, how did it 

 happen that this rye-crop got twice as much of those ele- 

 ments out the soil as the wheat-crop could get? It was 

 sterile for wheat ; but the rye gathered the same materials, 

 and it gathered double the quantity. To carry the illustra- 

 tion farther : I cultivate the rye until I cannot get more than 

 five or six bushels to the acre. That won't pay. Therefore 

 I put on the same land Indian corn. Now, what is the re- 

 sult? Why, on the land that gave me from five to seven 

 bushels of rye, I shall get from fifteen to twenty-five bushels 

 of Indian corn. Indian corn, the grain and its stalk, carried 

 away from that land, of potash, phosphoric acid, and lime, 

 four or five times as much as the rye. The rye could not get 

 it. How happens it that this Indian-corn plant has got so 

 much more ? I will tell you why ; and that is the point in 

 relation to water. First, I will admit that one reason why 

 the Indian-corn plant got so much more is, that the Indian- 

 corn plant staid on the land the longer time in the grow- 

 ing season; but the more important reason was this: the 

 root-expansion of the different plants, — that is the story, — 

 the root-expansion, and the vital power and force and energy 

 of the roots, of the different classes of plants. Let me illus- 

 trate this by the animal world. You turn into yonder brush 

 pasture, covered with brambles and brakes, and all sorts of 



