Review of Essays on Calcareous Manures. 143 



The practical farmer in some parts of our country, finding that in 

 a new soil, putrescent manures injure his crops, carts them out up- 

 on frozen rivers, in order that they may be carried away when the 

 streams thaw. He thus loses all recollection of the European tra- 

 dition of the necessity of restoring vegetable or animal matter to the 

 soil, and continues a cultivation growing yearly more exhausting, until 

 his land will no longer afford him a subsistence. His successor coming 

 from a longer settled district, or from an European country, trusts 

 wholly to putrescent manures, and is astonished that they often fail 

 in their effects ; but that an inert earthy matter should in some cases 

 be a substitute for organic manure, and in others should be abso- 

 lutely necessary to make it efficient, he will not believe, and laughs 

 at the idea of carting an absolutely barren soil to an unproductive 

 field. The earlier settler, who thinks no soil worthy of cultivation 

 which demands any manure, would be even more astonished were he 

 told, that by the use of a small quantity of a substance which his expe- 

 rience tells him destroys vegetation, he might have easily maintained 

 his lands in their original fertility, and instead of losing his whole la- 

 bor in clearing the soil, have continued to reap crops equal to the 

 earlier ones whose prospect tempted him to that arduous task. Yet 

 these propositions are strictly true. 



One only mineral manure has been of any extended use in our coun- 

 try, namely the sulphate of lime, usually called plaster of Paris. This 

 was luckily forced into notice by scientific farmers, and produced such 

 obvious effects that the most sceptical could not doubt. Yet the rea- 

 sons of its benefits are not generally understood, the causes of its fail- 

 ure in some positions not accounted for, and the injury that an un- 

 skilful use of it may produce, is rarely guarded against. 



The agriculture of America has proceeded from three distinct cen- 

 tres, and may be divided into three distinct and separate characters. 

 The settlers of New England were thrown upon a bleak shore, inca- 

 pable of yielding any valuable agricultural product for export. They 

 found and adopted the culture of maize as practiced by the Indians ; 

 this consisted in planting it in bills, each of which was manured by 

 one or more fishes ; and unable at first to see its value as a fallow 

 crop, repeated it in continual succession upon the same field. To this 

 they added the culture of European corn of various descriptions, fol- 

 lowing without alteration the husbandry introduced by the Romans 

 into Great Britain, and which is described almost identically in the 

 Georgics of Virgil. With a less command of labor, however, the 



