OUE WORN SOILS 73 



ioned and framed the soil into its fertile stage 

 and fitted it for the service of the husbandman. 



After Nature had broken up and spread over 

 the earth's surface the rock particles found in our 

 soils, in the course of time she filled these rock 

 particles with all kinds of growing vegetation. 

 Much of this vegetation through their root nodules 

 and soil bacteria drew from the air into the soil 

 for its use the soil's most precious element, nitro- 

 gen. And even in this day when the husbandman 

 strips the soil of its fertility under the lash of 

 continuous crop growing, and without manural 

 compensation, until it refuses longer to be driven 

 and it is abandoned by its heartless owner, Na- 

 ture, with the spirit of the kind Samaritan, pro- 

 ceeds to cure its ills with the medicine of organic 

 matter. 



A " 'forty-niner " who faced death in crossing 

 the barren, death dealing plains of our once called 

 Great American Desert, told the author that when 

 digging for gold in our Golden State, he once dug 

 a shaft into solid granite for a depth of seventy 

 feet, and that out of the broken pieces of granite 

 taken from the bottom of this shaft and thrown 

 upon the top of the dump, there sprang plants 

 the genus of which he nor any one else that he 

 could find had ever seen before. These plants 

 were but the simple tools of Nature by which she 

 was seeking to disintegrate these granite particles 

 and mix them up with the organic matter pro- 

 duced by the plants she fashioned to grow in the 

 pieces of granite, that she might prepare a soil 

 for man's use in growing crops for his service. 

 What a lesson is taught by this observation of 



