170 BOARI> OF AGRICULTURE. 



they may serve as a text for any agricultural thesis. It fol- 

 lows, then, as a necessary corollary, that you can no more con- 

 tinue to draw from a soil, however fertile, the elements which 

 go to form a crop, and look to maintain that condition of fer- 

 tilit}', without restoring in a measure such abstracted elements, 

 than you can expect to sustain animal life without food. Just 

 as a man or animal deprived of food will emaciate and dimin- 

 ish in weight day by day, until starvation ends in death, so 

 will the most fertile soil, when deprived, by a series of succes- 

 sions of one and the same crop, of the elements which enter 

 into the composition of that crop or plant, in the end become 

 utterly barren so far as that crop is concerned. 



Carry on this process, then, through a variety of- crops, and, 

 as a result, you have at last absolute sterility. What once 

 might have been as rich as the famed fields of Egypt has be- 

 come as sterile as the Great Desert, whose trackless wastes 

 crowd the very shores of the fertilizing Nile. This brings us 

 to the consideration of the subject of manures^ — a subject 

 which has exercised the minds of all tillers of the soil from 

 the time of the Bible patriarchs to the present day. " Quid 

 faciat loetas segetes " was a question two thousand years be- 

 fore the Latin poet sang to his princely patron the mysteries 

 of the agricultural art. 



The aversion of man to labor prompted him, when he first 

 commenced to dwell in fixed habitations and till the land 

 about him, to select first the rich alluvial soils, in the which 

 he found vegetation to grow the rankest : afterwards, as these 

 soils became exhausted of the elements to produce liis desired 

 crops, he was driven to the use of manures to restore to the 

 soil the elements abstracted. The first manure, then, used by 

 him must have been that of the animals domesticated by him. 

 We have only, in verification of this statement, to look 

 back through very recent times to the settlers of the rich 

 prairies of the West, with whom, for a period, the accumula- 

 tion of manure about the farm-sheds was a nuisance to 

 abate which the easiest way was found to consist in remov- 

 ing the buildings rather than the manure. As population 

 increased, and poorer soils were taken up and tilled, the 

 question of manuring, or how to make a poor soil yield a 

 crop, has been the greatest problem in agriculture. Such it 

 is to-day, — the highest tax on the labor of the husbandman. 



