No. 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. S51 



is contained in various proportions. A sample Mesozoic (New Red) 

 from Bucks county contained three per cent, potash, a little lime, two 

 and a quarter per cent, iron, seven and a quarter per cent, alumina, 

 a small quantity of phosphoric acid, eighty-four per cent, silica. 



The restoration of exhausted soils to a productive condition is 

 expensive. Notwithstanding the abundance of the plant elements 

 found by analysis in soils, crops can not be successfully produced 

 without given quantities of soluble materials. 



Chemistry is of invaluable service in many lines of human en- 

 deavor including agriculture. The farmer has, however, a wider 

 field for experiment than the chemist in his laboratory confined to a 

 limited space with his acids and crucibles. The farmer has for his 

 domain the mountains, hills and valleys, proclaiming in unmistakable 

 language the fertility or sterility of the soil. Poverty grass and 

 cinque-foil, huckleberry and hogberry, scrub oaks and alders, laurel 

 and fern, rock oak and red oak. Giant Sequols and cedars, pine 

 and hemlock, walnut and chestnut, hickory and sycamore, beech, 

 birch, and maple with the many grasses and plants indigenous to 

 the surroundings, constitute, in Nature a laboratory more delicate 

 and more refined than the most elaborate equipment in the hand of 

 science. 



Supplied with a tract of ground, some seeds and plants, patience 

 and industry, fertilizers of various kinds, the practical farmer can 

 solve the problems of fertility and crop production better than any 

 one else. Plants like animals require a balanced ration; the one 

 nitrogen, phosphoric acid and potash ; the other protein, carbohy- 

 drates and fats. The- business of the farmer is to take the crude ma- 

 terial, and through his chemical laboratory on the land change it 

 into the refined products useful to mankind. This appears to be a 

 simple process of transmutation ; it is surrounded with many diffi- 

 culties, contingencies and hard labor, that is so irksome to many 

 persons, retarding the back to the land movement. 



Practical farmers are not so much interested in scientific re- 

 search and theories as in the conditions with which they have to do 

 and how to use what they possess to the best advantage to i)i"ovide 

 for themselves what is required by them and of them. Soil depletion 

 like the shadow of an eclipse moves westward having reached the 

 100 degrees west longtitude in its progress over the Continent. 



We have the assurance that ''seedtime and harvest shall not fail," 

 so we may trust to Providence for the future of agriculture; in the 

 meantime preserve the soil and trust to explorers and prospectors to 

 find new stores of potash, nitrogen and phosphoric acid somewhere 

 on the national domain. 



While the Government is engaged in preserving natural resources, 

 one of the most valuable elements is Avasted ; nitrogen in explosives, 

 by firing salutes to thirty-cent Potentates, Embassadors, striplings 

 of Royalty and Kings from the Cannibal Islands, etc., costing hun- 

 dreds of dollars and the game not worth the powder. 



