86 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



hundred ; and if you can make a hundred, why not two, and 

 so keep on, until we can grow all the corn, and all the grass, 

 and all the other crops we want on a very small farm, and we 

 can sell most of our land?" That seems to be reasonable; 

 but stop a moment. A certain relation exists between the 

 soil and the air, and you cannot go any further with the soil 

 than Almighty God can with his air. You cannot produce 

 plants, unless the sunlight gets down in among them, and 

 acts upon the leaves and decomposes the carbonic acid, and 

 thus lays up gum, starch, sugar and woody fibres for the 

 plant. The air must circulate through the foliage of your 

 crop freely, and the sunlight must go with it. The sunlight 

 must shine directly down upon the laud, or else indirectly, so 

 that the land shall be warmed by the sun's heat, or the roots 

 will not act. You cannot, therefore, go any further in the 

 direction of large crops than the sunlight and air can go 

 through your crops and into your soil. When you get your 

 foliage so large as to shut these out, you are down. How far 

 can you go? To satisfy the farmers on that point, I thought 

 I would take that silly question to nature. I said : "Here is 

 a plot of this miserable drift soil. It contains eight square 

 rods. I will measure off plots for potatoes and corn, and 

 pile in material enough to make one hundred bushels to the 

 acre, and see what answer nature will make in return." I 

 thought I would not have anything to do with it myself; so 

 the next rainy day I asked a squad of boys to take their hoes, 

 take the coru and the materials, and go up to that laud and 

 plant the corn, putting three kernels in a hill, once in two 

 feet; the intention being to thin it to two stalks in a hill, the 

 rows being four feet apart. They went and came back, and 

 reported that the work was done, and of course, as we expect 

 agricultural students to do about the fair thing, I supposed it 

 was done right. When the time came for hoeing the corn I 

 went up and looked at it, and found the corn growing finely 

 on the plot where the fertilizer was not used, but the boys 

 did not understand the strength of the material, and they had 

 put the corn directly upon the fertilizer, and the consequence 

 was that a great many of the hills were missing. When I 

 found out that the fertilizer was deficient in potash, on the 

 20th of July I hoed it in, and that corn grew ; there is no dodg- 



