16 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



eudiometer. If one farmer is so fortunate as to live near a 

 neighbor who keeps his manure in a heap out of doors, he will 

 be likely to get more benefit from it than the owner, particularly 

 if he has a growing crop and the wind sets in the right direction, 

 and the owner after a while will find that the most valuable part 

 of his compost heap has escaped by dispersion through the at- 

 mosphere. He might have caught the runaway and held it for 

 the use of his own plants, if he had covered it with gypsum, 

 charcoal or peat. Chemistry can crystallize it, and mechanics 

 can make use of it in driving machinery. 



Would it not be wonderful if ammonia should prove to be 

 not only the great chemical agent, but the motive power of the 

 farm ? As for lotting it lie out of doors, in the weather, in a 

 heap of manure, a man might as well leave his purse in the 

 street. As all soils originated from the disintegration of rocks, 

 you may reasonably infer that a mountainous region like this, 

 full of rocks, contains very many, if not all the mineral manures 

 you need. How are you to avail yourselves of them ? Many a 

 farmer lives, works hard, and dies poor, never knowing or 

 dreaming that latent powers of rich production were all the time 

 lying just beneath the surface of his farm. The beautiful Nea- 

 politan hats are made of straw glazed in its growth by fertilizers 

 belched from the bowels of the earth by volcanic Vesuvius. A 

 purely vegetable soil, when exhausted of alkalies and mineral 

 ingredients, will neither give strength to the straw nor body to 

 the grain. The plant may become an herb, but bears no fruit 

 and droops prematurely. 



The lightning once struck a stack of hay in Germany, and 

 left only a vitreous mass which the people took to be a meteoric 

 stone. It proved to be the melted ashes of the hay, converted 

 into solidified silicate of potash. Thus you get a hint of what 

 it is you are carrying off from your meadows in the hay harvest, 

 and what it is that irrigation probably restores to them. 



EXAMPLE OF DUTCH AND SWISS FARMING. 



A few years ago, standing at the top of the tower of the great 

 church of Rotterdam, I counted one hundred and forty-five 

 windmills in sight, and these were but a small part of the num- 

 ber engaged in pumping out the water to drain the flat farming 

 lands of Holland. At an enormous expense they had diked out 



