ADAPTATION TO VARIETIES OF SOIL AND CLIMATE. 37 



among granite rocks and on the richest bottoms. I 

 have been," he adds, " in a two hundred acre field 

 in Ohio that has produced annually a good crop of 

 corn for over fifty years without manure." 



There is, indeed, scarcely a plant cultivated by man 

 that will grow with equal success in so great a diver- 

 sity of soils. The evidence of this fact is met with 

 in every direction through the country. The travel- 

 ler whose way lies through cultivated districts, passes 

 over many qualities of land, yet nowhere does he miss 

 the ever-recurring cornfield. However far he may 

 go, the soil along his way, like the landscape that 

 meets his eye, is constantly changing, but the crop of 

 growing maize continually reappears. He passes a 

 thousand planted fields, so various in the composition 

 of their soils that scarcely any two of them are iden- 

 tical ; yet of that thousand fields he finds a large 

 proportion planted with corn. 



But though this ubiquitous cereal so readily adapts 

 itself to the new condition it finds in each new local- 

 ity, making itself a home amid uncongenial elements, 

 and often growing with luxuriance where other ce- 

 reals will scarcely grow at all, we are by no means to 

 infer that the quality of the land where it grows is a 

 matter of indifference. On the contrary, there is no 

 grain more sensitive on this point than maize ; none 

 that pays so munificently for fertility of soil in the 

 affluence of its yield. 



Another property of this grain, which no other 

 cereal possesses in an equal degree, is the VARIETY OF 

 CLIMATE to which it is adapted, and the facility with 



