COMMERCIAL FERTILIZERS GYPSUM. 103 



season will do, mj present impression is that it will 

 do most good if applied when the Summer is hottest 

 and the ground driest. If, for instance, you close 

 your haying in mid-Summer, having been hurried by 

 the rapid ripening of the grass, and find your mea- 

 dows baked and cracked by the intense heat, I reckon 

 that you may proceed to dust those meadows with 

 Gypsum with a moral certainty that none of it will 

 be wasted. So if your Corn and other Fall crops are 

 suffering from and likely to be stunted by drouth, I 

 advise the application of Gypsum broadcast, as evenly 

 as may be and as bounteously as its price and your 

 means will allow. I do not believe it so well to 

 apply it specially to the growing stalks, a spoon-full 

 or so per hill ; and I doubt that it is ever judicious 

 to plant it in the hill with the seed. The readiest 

 and quickest mode of application is also, I believe, 

 the best. 



How Gypsum impels and invigorates vegetable 

 growth, I do not pretend to know ; but that it does 

 so was demonstrated by Nature long before Man 

 took the hint that she. freely gave. The city of Paris 

 and a considerable adjacent district rest on a bed of 

 Gypsum, ranging from five to twenty feet below the 

 surface, and considerably decomposed in its upper 

 portion by the action of water. This region produces 

 Wheat most luxuriantly, and I presume has done so 

 from time immemorial. At length it crawled through 

 the hair of the tillers of this soil that the substance 

 which did so much good fortuitously, and (as it were) 



