DIGEST OP STATE REPORTS. 389 



The usual country meeting of the board was held at Haverhill, Essex 

 County, in November. In his opening address, Mr. George B. Loring 

 thus alludes to the place of meeting : 



The town in whicli wo are assembled has long been distincjuished for the care and 

 system with which the land has been cultivated and the business of manufacturing 

 has been conducted. Settled, as it was, two hundred and thirty-five years ago, in 

 precisely the same manner in which so many New England towns were settled, by an 

 honest, faithful, and earnest clei-gymau leading his little flock into the wilderness for 

 Ibo purpose of enjoying what our fathers demanded and insisted on here, " freedom 

 to worship God," it. became at last one of those towns ih the county which were dis- 

 tinguished for the skill and prosperity of the agricultural community which was settled 

 here. It was finely located on the banks of this swift-running river, which came flash- 

 ing along from the mountains of New Hampshire and the lakes above, with no alluvial 

 soil, but with those rich and fertile and heavy clay banks which are so superior, under 

 the long-continued toil of the farmer, for the purposes of the various crops. Here the 

 fathers established a prosperous agricultural community, and year after year, for more 

 than two centuries, Haverhill performed her part as one of the leading towns in this 

 commonwealth. When the business of agriculture began to decline and the attention 

 of our people was turned to other branches of business, how she sprang forth to accept 

 the work which was then laid before us, advancing in a few years from a little town 

 of 3,.500 people, prosperous in their agricultural pursuits, to a city of almost 15,000 

 people, with more than 150 firms engaged in the manufacture of leather and its prod- 

 ucts, and with an annual production of $10,000,000 from her industry alone. 



Mr. Loring gives the following instances in illustration of the fertility 

 of the soil of Essex County in former years : 



I remember one of the records kept in this county less than a century ago, in which 

 it was stated that under the ordinary cultivation of the soil 750 bushels of potatoes 

 had been raised upon one acre of land, and 650 bushels of carrots, 850 bushels-of ruta- 

 bagas, (Swedish turnips,) and 1,050 bushels of mangold- wurzels ; and upon ten acres 

 of land for thirty years there had been produced an average of three tons of hay to the 

 acre — land that had not been broken by the plow in all that time, but had received at 

 the hand of the cultivator a fair and proper top-dressing from year to year. 



Prof. Levi Stockbridge read a paper on plant-food, in which he gives 

 the results of a series of experiments in feeding plants, conducted on the 

 agricultural-college farm. He asks: "What have the ordinary varia- 

 tions of our seasons to do with the nutrition of plants, or with the devel- 

 opment of plant-food in the soiH" Answering, "Much, every way," he 

 proceeds to explain by saying : 



If we have a wet season, an extra quantity of water- fall, this fills the interspaces of 

 the soil so that the air is excluded, so that the warmth is excluded ; the soil does not 

 become heated. The coarse, raw, undecomposed, unfermented mass of barn-yard 

 manure, compost, muck, straw, clover, or grain crops plowed in, remain dormant and 

 dead, no nutriment is formed, and your plant is starved for want of food. If, on the 

 other hand, your season is one of excessiv.e drought, little rain-fall, and the soil be- 

 comes dry, so that decomposition stops, then your raw, crude material, your barn- 

 yard manure, and your muck remain unchaaged; no food is formed, and your plant 

 starves for want of nutrition. Now, then, the seasons have to do with plant-nutrition 

 in just this way, and the farmer should have known that if he would feed his plants, 

 and do it thoroughly, with the variations of the seasons, he could uot afford to trust 

 them to make plant-food out of raw or crude materials; but that it was a part of his 

 duty to prepare the food for his plants ere he committed it to the soil, and then the 

 action of the season of which he complains would have been entirely obviated, and he 

 could have produced crops yearly without regard to these variations of the seasons 

 which make maximum or minimum crops. 



After stating that the primary aim of a series of experiments begun 

 at the agricultural college in 1869 was "to prove just this thing,_ 

 whether certain elements of plant-food, prepared in the condition of 

 plant-food ready to nourish the plant, would not nourish and produce 

 almost in any quantity desired, without regard to the ordinary varia- 

 tions of the season," he continues : 



The first point to bo ascertained was, whether certain elements of plant-nutrition— 

 •prepared in a certain way and given to the plants — would produce plants. Those ex- 



