94 . THE NEW AGRICULTURE. 



affected the crop only indirectly, and often remotely, was 

 beyond even the power of suspicion to suggest. 



To-day the intelligent farmer knows that the soil is not 

 a composition of inert matter, but that it is so peopled by active 

 organisms as to entitle it to the consideration of a living mass, 

 and that every man who owns a farm may become a master and 

 a monarch, 'exercising dominion over the living and not the 

 dead. 



The basis of all soil formation is bald rock, the original 

 mineral composition of which, together with the circumstances 

 of its disintegration, determine the nature of soils in specific 

 localities. The granites, with their composite constitution of 

 quartz, feldspar, hornblend, biotite ; the volcanic rocks, the 

 limestones of different kinds all have been acted upon by 

 the alternate seasons of heat and cold, by the alternate periods 

 of wet and dry. Furious storms have swept over them ; sleet 

 and hail have pelted them ; under the influence of sun and 

 frost they have contracted, expanded and split and the roots of 

 plants have forced themselves into their crevices ; th'e disinte- 

 grating influences of all Nature have crumbled them, and 

 rains and winds have washed and carried the debris into the 

 plain. Surface and rain waters and the moisture of the at- 

 mosphere, all charged with various acids formed in the lab- 

 oratory of Nature, dissolving out certain substances, leave 

 only silica and aluminum, which, with water, forms clay. The 

 quartz, remaining undecomposed, is set free as grains of sand 

 by the disintegration of other minerals, and, mixed with the 

 clay, loosens the latter, causing it to take on the semblance 

 of an arable soil. 



When organic matter, either animal or vegetable, is per- 

 mitted to decay, while a part escapes as carbonic acid gas, 



