400 EUROPEAN AGRICULTURE. 



exhaustion of the soil, by the continued repetition of the same 

 crop, of ingredients or elements important to its growth and 

 maturity, certainly seems reasonable and well established ; but 

 the dread which seems to possess some minds of an exhaustion 

 which would doom the soil to perpetual barrenness, without some 

 extraordinary supply of the materials of which it has been de 

 prived, may have more ground to rest upon, when the birds in 

 any country or locality are unable to find lime to form the shells 

 of their eggs, and animals become mere lumps of gum-elastic for 

 want of material to form their bones.* 



There is a recuperative power in nature by which it would seem 

 that any soil, originally adapted to the growth of any particular 

 plant, by rest, or by the growth of other and different plants, be 

 comes again fitted for the original cultivation. That this may 

 be hastened by artificial manures, there can be no doubt. That 

 science may at last achieve the great discovery of a way by 

 which the same plant may be cultivated uninterruptedly year 

 after year on the same soil, is certainly to be hoped for. 

 Whether this object is already accomplished by this distin 

 guished philosopher, is now to be submitted to actual experiment 

 by those who can afford to purchase this artificial manure. 



* The fears which seem to haunt some minds, lest, by cultivation, the exhaus 

 tion of the soil should proceed so far as ultimately to put even the existence of 

 the human race in peril, from famine, may be useful enough in exciting men to 

 frugality in the saving of manures, and enterprise and industry in their applica 

 tion ; but seem as little warranted as the sanguine expectations of the Millerites, 

 who looked for the end of the world in April, 1843, and some of whom, having 

 got their white robes fitted, and their wings spread, seemed to be rather out of 

 temper that their predictions failed, and that Heaven in its mercy granted the 

 &quot; poor dogs,&quot; the unbelievers, a short reprieve. Voltaire, when admonished that 

 coffee was a slow poison, remarked that it must be very slow indeed, for he had 

 drunk it constantly for seventy years. Mr. Lyell, in his late Tour in the United 

 States, (which, let me remark by the way, is written in the calm spirit of a philo 

 sophical observer, and does honor to his candor and sense of justice, as well as to 

 his scientific attainments,) is of opinion that the time occupied in the recession of 

 Niagara Falls from the shores of Lake Ontario, where they once were, to their 

 present position, could not have been less than 35,000 years ; and that the fossil 

 remains, both vegetable and animal, now found there, show that even this period, 

 startling as it may seem, belongs to a modern and not a primeval era. How idle 

 in respect to these matters, seem, then, the calculations of beings, who 



. are such stuff 



As dreams are made of, and whose little life 

 Is rounded with a sleep ! &quot; 



