27G State Board of Agriculture, &o. 



deposit, my neiglibors, Roderick Baldwin and the late Me- 

 dad Ilurlbnrt, and myself, drew several sleigh loads of this 

 marl and spread it on meadow land that was easily reached, 

 as an experiment, and without taking notice of the many 

 other sources of lime from which the soil could draw its 

 supplies; the result was like the " going-it-hlind " application 

 of gypsum. The soil on which it was spread already con- 

 tained its measure of lime, more than that it was not pre- 

 pared to receive, and our gratuity did neither good nor 

 harm ; and no farther experiments were tried by us. Some 

 persons might be inclined to infer from the result of our 

 experiment that shell Tnarl was in all cases useless ; this 

 would be no more correct than to say that as gypsum occa- 

 sionally fails of producing the desired result, gypsum is 

 useless. 



The writer can call to mind an experiment tried by a far- 

 mer in Kent County, thirty miles south of London. He 

 had one tield whi(;h received much of his attention, but the 

 crops he gathered from it were not equal to his expectations. 

 Near by was a limekiln in which chalk was burned ; the 

 broken lumps, too nearly ground to powder to be thrown 

 into the kiln, were gathered and spread on a strip through 

 the middle of the field, and when the next crop made its 

 appearance, the line between the chalked and the nnchalked 

 soil was plainly to be seen. The chalk contains ninely-tivo 

 per cent., shell marl seventy five per cent,, of carbonate of 

 lime. 



We must fall back upon om* own convictions. We know- 

 that lime in some form, especially the carbonate of lime, is 

 needed. We know that at a great cost per hundred pounds 



