NOT EASILY SATISFIED. 79 



upon different farms and under different circumstances ; " and 

 so I sent to Hadley, to an observing, careful farmer, in the 

 same year, 1873, and I said; "I want you to try this ex- 

 periment. I will bring you the material, and I want you to 

 try it on the poorest piece of land on God's earth that will 

 grow anything." I thought he had some on his farm. He 

 said he had, and he would do it. He selected a piece of poor, 

 sandy land lying upon a ridge, that had not a spear of grass 

 growing upon it. It had on it some rye-stubble of very feeble 

 growth and wild wormwood, and he told me that the last 

 crop of rye was about four bushels to the acre. I asked him 

 how much corn that land would produce without any manure. 

 "Well," he said, "if it is a first-rate year, with abundance of 

 rain, I may, perhaps, get fifteen bushels to the acre." " Well," 

 I said, "that does not make any difference. I will bring you 

 the materials to make twenty -five bushels, with the natural 

 proportion of stalks. Take it and try the experiment. I 

 am going to leave it entirely to you. You put the material 

 on as I tell you, carefully cultivate the crop, and in the fall 

 report to me the result, — twenty-five bushels to the acre." I 

 told him he should have the corn the land would produce, and 

 that if, without manure, it would produce fifteen bushels, then 

 the plot with manure should produce forty bushels. I saw 

 the corn twice in the summer, but I did not see him on the 

 land. He reported that he husked it in November ; that it 

 was very dry when he husked it, and, therefore, he weighed 

 it at the time of husking, and called seventy pounds in the 

 ear a bushel of corn. On that basis of reckoning, his report 

 was as follows : the plot without manure, which he thought 

 would yield fifteen bushels to the acre, yielded eighteen ; the 

 plot with manure, which should have yielded, on my calcula- 

 tion, forty-three bushels, yielded forty-eight. The experi- 

 ment on the College farm ran over four and one-quarter 

 bushels ; the experiment on Mr. Hurd's farm ran over just 

 five bushels. 



The same year (because, as I said, we reached out to see 

 what we could learn under different circumstances) I sent to 

 a careful, observing farmer in Sunderland, and I said, "I 

 want this experiment tried on the alluvial soil of the Sunder- 

 land meadows ; you have good land here, and I want you 



