464 EUROPEAN AGRICULTURE. 



portion of this principle in the whole mass, such as 2 parts in 

 300 but this seems evidently indispensable. Whether it is 

 absolutely necessary in a certain proportion, as food of the plant, 

 or whether it operates in preparing other matters in the soil to 

 become food for it, I shall not presume even to give an opinion. 

 I must submit to minds qualified by the high attainments of 

 science, to follow out inquiries so subtile, and at the same time 

 so curious. 



I have occupied the attention of my readers a long time on the 

 subject of the culture of wheat, because of its immense impor 

 tance. In the United States we cannot be said as yet to have 

 known want; but in the years 1812 and 1816 there was, 

 throughout the whole of New England, an almost entire failure 

 of the crop of Indian com : and it was not until such experience 

 came upon us that many persons were fully sensible how much 

 and how essentially this product entered into our daily wants. 

 The wheat crop has become infinitely more important, for, with 

 the exception of the slave states, I do not know a district of the 

 country where it does not form by far the principal food of the 

 population. But one has need to have lived in Europe through 

 a famine to know the immense importance of any great and 

 general article of subsistence ; and the suffering among the mass 

 of the community, which follows even its scarcity, still more the 

 miseries and horrors which its total loss brings upon them. It 

 is a fact which, as long as human memory endures, will stand 

 out in bold relief on the darkest pages of history, that, in the 

 years 1846 and 1847, in a country not so large as New England, 

 by the blight of a single crop, not less than 116,000 of human 

 beings actually perished by the awful death of starvation, not to 

 add the thousands, I may add safely the hundreds of thousands, 

 who were swept away by diseases engendered by unwholesome 

 or insufficient food ; and not to recur to the awful sufferings of 

 the thousands and thousands who had strength enough to strug 

 gle through this trial, and in the midst of this dreadful shipwreck 

 were just able to reach the shore. 



With a rapidly increasing population in all parts of the civil 

 ized world, the production of bread is obviously the first object 

 to be sought after, alike by the statesman and the peasant. I 

 scarcely dare give the calculation of the immense amount 

 which would be realized, in any great country, by the single 



