AMERICAN AGRICULTURE. 



CHAPTERIL 



MANURES. 



WHILE soils are permitted to remain in their natural state, 

 or if denuded of their original foliage and used only for pas- 

 ture, little or no change is perceptible either in their charac- 

 ter or productive powers. A slight change, however, is 

 gradually wrought in their texture and capacity for produc- 

 tion, which is fully revealed in the lapse of centuries. The 

 elevated mountain's side, and the steep declivities of hills, 

 support an annual vegetation of more or less luxuriance ; 

 and a portion of this, together with the broken twigs and the 

 wasting trunks of fallen trees, are carried down by the rains, 

 and become a rich addition to the lower soils on which they 

 ultimately rest. Beside the vegetable matter thus annually 

 removed from one spot and accumulated upon another, 

 many of the fertilizing salts, which the action of the roots, or 

 exposure to the atmosphere has rendered soluble, and the 

 finer particles of earth, which the alternations of heat and frost, 

 of rain and drought, have reduced to dust, are also washed 

 out of the higher soils and deposited on the plains and val- 

 leys below. Such doubtless, was once the condition of those 

 secondary bottom-lands, which for ages, probably, received 

 the rich deposits from other soils ; but whose present situa- 

 tions, elevated beyond even the extraordinary rise of the 

 rivers whose course is near, show some radical alteration of 

 their respective levels, by which the inundations no longer 

 contribute to their fertilization. 



These soils being well stored with the food of plants, and 

 frequently to a great depth, will bear large successive crops 

 for a long period : and they have in many instances, been 

 treated by their first occupants as if they were inexhausti- 

 ble. Of this description, were the James River and other 

 alluvial lands in Virginia, some of which were continued in 

 uninterrupted crops of corn and tobacco for more than a cen- 

 tury, without the addition of manures. But they have long 

 since become exhausted ; and the more careful planters are 



