156 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



restore the partial invalids, but prevent the farmers' wives 

 and children from becoming invalids. Now, what is that 

 worth ? Item 1. Then, there are the following crops of hay, 

 much finer in quality and larger in quantity. What is its 

 enhanced value? Item 2. Then what is the enhanced value- 

 of your stock, fed on that better quality of hay? Item 3. 

 Now, add these three items, and subtract the sum from the cost 

 of the lime, and charge the balance to your rich field of wheat. 

 The question of affordiug the cost of the lime, ashes, plaster 

 and bone-meal for the wheat, resolves itself into the question 

 whether a farmer can better afi'ord to raise a field of straw 

 alone, or what is about a maximum yield, on lime-exhausted 

 soils, ten or fifteen bushels per acre ; or raise thirty and forty 

 bushels to the acre, on robust straw, standing erect till har- 

 vested? Fed on the latter, his wife and children will be 

 robust and healthy, so far as bone feed is necessary to health 

 and vigor ; fed on the ten bushels of poverty wheat, they will 

 as certainly wilt, as the cow wilts fed on June grass ; and as 

 the calf wilts borne by that cow, and fed with her milk. 

 As to grass, the question is, Can the farmer better afibrd to 

 raise a half-ton per acre of June grass, or kindred poverty 

 grasses ; or even his two tons to the acre, on newly seeded 

 grounds, if these two tons are deficient in elements the animal 

 constitution demands? The feeding is the test. Fed on 

 June grass, cows wilt bearing as well as feeding their young. 

 The calves have a sickly appearance ; though nature in her 

 efibrts to supply the lack of phosphates in the feed, will go 

 to the extent of reducing the mother's bones to phosphatic 

 elements, to feed her young, till her bones become honey- 

 combed and without strength ; and the mother so weak as to 

 fall down, unable to rise. After all this painfully afiecting 

 efibrt of nature to transfer the life and health and happiness 

 of the mother to the offspring, to supply the lack in her feed 

 from which to elaborate proper nutriment for her young, still 

 the sight of that calf reveals the fact that there is a lack in 

 his feed ; and there is as great a lack in that milk, for the 

 farmer's children, as for his calves ; while the newly seeded 

 grasses, grown on soils exhausted of lime, will scarcely do 

 more for his stock than to enable them to hold their own. Is 

 the cow that simply holds her own, yielding her maximum 



