SOIL ANALYSIS. 451 



stituents, whose presence or absence would cause it to be pro- 

 ductive or sterile, as the case might be. In otlier, and plainer 

 ■words, because it appears improbable, it is called impossible. 



This is a singular argument to use in this age of the world, 

 when every day exhibits its miracle ; and the fingers of Clio, 

 the Muse of History, ache with recording the triumphs of 

 Science ! When Jenncr announced that Vaccination was a pre- 

 servative against smallpox, the entire medical nose of Europe 

 was upturned in derision. Wise men said it was puerile to 

 expect so great a result from so inadequate and unphilosophical 

 a cause. Pious men rolled up the whites of their eyes, and 

 pronounced it sin, to set up the teat of a peaceful cow as a 

 protection from the scourge of God. Conservative men called 

 it " a new doctrine ;" and, with this unanswerable argument, 

 set it away among humbugs. A woman — to the honor of the 

 sex be it declared — (the Lady Mary Wortley Montague) thought 

 it could be tried ; and who, now, denies what the wise men, 

 and the pious men, and the conservative men of the last century 

 declared to be impossible ? 



You cannot, for instance, (say the opponents of soil analysis,) 

 find, and properly estimate the lime where it exists, as is often 

 the case, in the proportion of thirty pounds of lime, to two mil- 

 lion pounds of soil on an acre. This statement of the case 

 would appear more startling to me, who am more of an annalist 

 than an analyzer, were the former feats of science unknown to 

 me. But when I know that the eyes of science have seen a 

 star, so distant from our globe that its light, jogging along at 

 the gentle pace of two hundred thousand miles in a second, 

 consumes more than three thousand years in coming from home, 

 hither ; when I know how far sighted she is, I am prepared to 

 believe that she may be gifted with a nicety of touch, to finger, 

 weigh and appreciate any atom, however small. When science 

 can read the decrees of God, before they are promulgated, (as 

 when foretelling eclipses and the approach of the erratic comet,) 

 it is not overtasking credulity to declare, that she can discover 

 the component parts of a piece of dirt, taken in the hand to be 

 examined at leisure. 



But we are told, with an air of ill-conccalcd triumpli, that 

 men eminent for their scientific acquirements, have pronounced 



