No. 4.] INUNDATED LANDS. 389 



the surface in plough tillage, preferably with root crops. A 

 little later the earth becomes well suited for the growth of 

 herd's-grass and other forage plants. It appears likely, 

 however, that red-top is the best suited to these areas which 

 have been recently won to tillage. If the fields are left for 

 even a few years without ploughing, they are apt to become 

 occupied by a growth of bushes and low-growing trees, such 

 as our white birches. It is therefore desirable to push 

 forward the operations of tillage as rapidly as possible. 

 When fairly won to use, these fields of the marine marshes 

 may, on account of their very large returns, the ease of the 

 culture which need be applied to them, the absence of all 

 need of artificial fertilizing and their nearness to great 

 markets, be fairly reckoned as worth two hundred and fifty 

 dollars an acre. Under favorable conditions they can be 

 brought into satisfactory shape at a cost of about one hun- 

 dred dollars an acre. 



The total area of these marine marshes wit .in the limits 

 of Massachusetts appears, from the estimates I have made, 

 to be about ninety thousand acres, of which probably more 

 than one-half can readily be won to tillage. The size of the 

 fields varies from that within Plum Island, which contains 

 ten thousand acres, to innumerable smaller areas, each less 

 than ten acres in extent. A list which I have made, which 

 includes no fields of less than thirty acres in extent, amounts 

 to more than one hundred and twenty ; including the areas 

 of more than five acres in extent, there are probably as 

 many as five hundred distinct fields within the limits of this 

 Commonwealth, of which about a dozen contain a thousand 

 or more acres. It is therefore evident that these land 

 reserves are of the utmost importance to the future of our 

 agriculture. 



So far the only considerable effort to win these marshes to 

 tillage has been in the town of Marshfield, where, a number 

 of years ago, an area of about fifteen hundred acres was 

 diked off from the sea. Unfortunately, litigation and even 

 violence has delayed the work of bringing the greater part 

 of this area under tillage, yet the results show the admira- 

 ble fertility of the soil. Fields which of old gave only 

 scanty crops of marsh grass now yield very large returns of 



