MANURING NEAR EDINBURGH. 365 



is til at, year by year, our Transatlantic cousins will 

 become less and less able — except in extraordinary 

 seasons — to send large supplies of wheat to our island 

 ports ; and that, when the virgin freshness shall have been 

 rubbed off their new lands, they will be unable, loith their 

 jyresent knoicledge and methods^ to send wheat to the 

 British market so cheap as the more skilful farmers of 

 Great Britain and Ireland can do. 



If any one less familiar with practical agriculture 

 doubts that such must be the final effect of the exhausting 

 system now followed on all the lands of North America, 

 1 need only inform him that the celebrated Lothian 

 farmers, in the immediate neighbourhood of Edinburgh, 

 who carry all their crops off the land — as the North 

 American farmers now do — return, on an average, ten tons 

 of well-rotted manure every year to every acre, while the 

 American farmer returns nothing.* If the Edinburgh 

 farmer finds this quantity necessary to keep his land In 

 condition, that of the American farmer must go out of 

 condition, and produce inferior crops In a time which will 

 bear a relation to the original richness of the soil, and to 

 the weight of crop it has been in the habit of producing. 

 And when this exhaustion has come, a more costly system 

 of generous husbandry must be introduced, if the crops 

 are to be kept up ; and in this more generous system, my 

 belief is, that the British farmers will have the victory. 



I have spoken, the reader will bear in mind, of wheat 

 only. Make it an object to the Central States to send 

 their maize to England, instead of converting it into pork 

 for the packers of Cincinnati ; and, as I have not examined 

 those States, I do not know wha"t limit should be placed 

 to the quantity they could continue to send us for many 



* The Edinburgh farmer sells all ofif— turnips, potatoes, straw, grain, 

 and hay. But he manui es his turnips with thirty, and his potatoes 

 with forty loads of manure, in a rotation consistmg of potatoes, wheat, 

 turnips, barley, hay, and oats. 



