298 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



plant pease or beans upon a field where there is no trace of 

 lime in 'the soil, although it may be rich in potash and phos- 

 phoric acid, upon which other plants would live and thrive, 

 they will as certainly famish as though you sowed them in the 

 granite quarries of Quincy, or among the glaciers of the Alps. 

 To attempt to feed the different varieties of plants upon the 

 dust atoms of a single kind of rock, would be as absurd as to 

 gather the different races of men together, and endeavor to sus- 

 tain them upon the watery fruits of the tropics. While the 

 seething negro would satiate his appetite, and gTow lusty, upon 

 the water-melon and the banana, the greasy Esquimaux would 

 cry aloud for his train oil and blubber, and if it was withheld, 

 he would probably die from the cravings of unappeased hun- 

 ger. A plant is like an infant, as respects the preparation of 

 its food. It has no teeth to masticate, no salivary glands to 

 pour out diluting fluids, to render digestible its rocky aliment, 

 and yet it can receive it only in a liquid, soluble form. Its 

 mouths are microscopic, and nothing not mhiutely subdivided 

 can pass their portals. 



You, gentlemen, are men nurses, laboring among your plant 

 children, pulverizing and moistening their food, (unless the 

 clouds aid you sufficiently with their misty treasures,) even as 

 the female nurse within the precincts of the children's nursery 

 is busily employed in preparing and rendering easily digestible 

 that which the appetite of her little troop so urgently demands. 



Nature does much by the activity of those forces already al- 

 luded to, to prepare the inorganic food of vegetables. Although 

 the rocks have crumbled into powder of varied fineness, and 

 the mass of this powder constitutes the soil, yet the largest 

 portion of it is still very far from being fine enough to be appro- 

 priated by plants. Minute atoms of granite, of limestone and 

 feldspar, scarcely perceptible without the aid of the microscope, 

 pervade every soil, and must be further acted upon by carbonic 

 acid from the air, by rain, by mechanical forces, &c., before it 

 is of any use to your maize plants, your tubers, your grains and 

 vines. 



It will be understood then, that you may possess land, rich, 

 perhaps, in the mineral substance which a peculiar grain re- 

 quires, and yet after successive crops it may languish and fail, 

 for the want of a substance already in the soil, but which is not 



