226 MY FARM. 



creased vigor. The man who, having retired to 

 the shade for a fresh chapter of Liebig, finds that 

 cellulose enters largely into the structure of his 

 plants, and thereupon gives his crops a dressing of 

 clean, pine saw-dust, would very likely have his laboi 

 for his pains. That wonderful vital laboratory of 

 the plant, has its own way of effecting combinations ; 

 and stealing, as it does, the elements of its needed 

 cellulose, in every laughing toss of its leaves it 

 scorns your offering. 



It is a chemical truth that the starch in potatoes 

 or wheat, is the same thing with the woody fibre of 

 a tree ; but it is not an agricultural fact differs as 

 widely from it in short, as a stiffened shirt-collar 

 from the main-mast ot a three-decker ship. A far 

 mer comes to the chemist with some dust or bolus 

 from a far-away place, and asks what is in it ; he can 

 tell upon examination, and if, after such examination 

 he finds it to possess a large percentage of soluble 

 phosphoric acid, he will advise its use as a manure, 

 and can promise that it will contribute largely to the 

 vigor of a wheat crop ; all this not simply because 

 phosphoric-acid is a constituent part of the grain, but 

 because he knows that other dressings containing a 

 like element, have invariably so contributed ; the 

 fact being established by repeated farm-trials. But 

 it is not a result detenninable, so far as a field-crop 



