MANUS A HAND. IO/ 



the wrong you have done. Good Fortune will leave 

 your home, and hungry Poverty will come unbidden, 

 and sit at your dinner-table. The cotton-plant is 

 valuable to us for its lint, but the lint is a very small 

 part of the plant. On many a cotton-plantation, in 

 the past, the plants were left to wither away in the 

 ground, and the seeds, rich in precious elements, were 

 thrown away and lost ; and then the planter wondered 

 why his poor, starved fields refused to grow more 

 cotton. Planters are wiser now, and the seeds, even 

 when crushed to extract the oil, are carefully returned 

 to the ground as a fertilizer ; and the plants are buried, 

 or burned and the ashes returned to the land, that the 

 future crops may not perish of starvation. It may be 

 thought just here, that, if animals produce manure, it 

 would be better to give them the waste plants to eat. 

 This is true, and we shall consider it in future studies. 

 But in gardens where no cows or pigs are kept, all use- 

 less plants and weeds should be buried in the ground 

 or compost-heap just as soon as possible ; for, the 

 greener and fresher they are, the more they will enrich 

 the soil. 



xxn. WHAT TO DO. When men first began 

 to use manure to improve the soil, they knew nothing 

 of the elements of the soil. They only knew that a 

 field that is manured bears larger crops than one that 

 is not manured. Their experiments proved that when 

 manure is applied year after year, the soil remains 

 continually fertile, and thus an old field becomes just 

 as good as a new one. There they stopped ; and 



