/ 
SOILS REQUIRED—CULTURE—MANURING. 49 
SHOULD HILLING BE PRACTICED! 
There are in our own country, advanced by various 
cultivators, conflicting opinions relative to the practice of 
hilling corn. Some maintain its superior efficacy in 
causing the appearance of extra roots, which serve to pro- 
tect the plants from prostration by storms, and others as 
strenuously urging that the very effort thus forced upon 
the plant is an unnatural one, and is met by the penalty 
of diminishing its strength. This same adversity of 
opinion has been manifested in respect to the sorgho cul- 
ture. Mr. Hardy, of Algiers, hills his plants three feet 
apart, and irrigates them by making alongside each row a 
slight surface furrow with a corn plow, and turning in it 
a gentle streamlet of water from his brook or reservoir ; 
but Dr. Sicard maintains that hilling is very unadvisable, 
because the Chinese Sugar Cane has need of roots com- 
mencing on the stall above the surface of the ground; 
that, by their free contact with the atmosphere, there 
may be absorbed carbonic acid and other nutritive gases, 
and the just starting sap being thus early acted upon by 
gases and sunbeam, is made more prone to crystallize at 
a later period of its elaboration. His assumptions, he 
maintains, were fully borne out by the comparative ex- 
periments made on the hilled and flat cultivated plants 
on his field. Without assuming the right or ability to 
settle the vexed question as to the chemical principles 
involved, I would merely give my preference to the sys- 
tem of cultivating flat and in drills on fair soils, for with 
the improved implements which are so easily obtainable 
at this time, and without which no farmer can really 
8 
