MANAGEMENT OF FARMS. 27 



But to return to the practical management of our farms. 

 Let us consider briefly, and in only a sketchy way, the sub- 

 ject of the most economical mode of fertiliziug our lands. I 

 do not presume, in the face of this large and intelligent body 

 of practical farmers, to deal with this important and com- 

 plicated subject, exhaustively, in an anniversary address. 

 The want of time and the variety of antagonistical theories 

 which confront this important question, and indeed my own 

 incapacity to grasp a scientific subject of such magnitude 

 before a reading audience like this, constrains me to adduce a 

 few facts and shape my suggestions in such a way as to 

 induce you to investigate the subject more deeply for your- 

 selves, not for the purpose of undervaluing the established 

 use of barn-yard manure, which must always continue an 

 important fertilizing auxiliary of our farms, but to inves- 

 tigate the importance aud economical values of the artificial 

 substitutes by which nearly the whole civilized world have 

 increased the productive power of farm lands in the last 

 quarter of a century, and ask yourselves whether the agricult- 

 ure of Massachusetts should be an exception in the pro- 

 fitable use of this contribution to agricultural science. 



Apart from the relative cheapness of these artificial 

 manures, the great facility of procuring any quantity at 

 any time, and the greater saving of labor in applying them, 

 it has been demonstrated that the production of the barn-yard 

 falls far short of restoring the waste and general impoverish- 

 ment of many important chemical qualities in the land, 

 steadily cropped or pastured. Formerly rotation of crops 

 and throwing out lands to fallow, in England, was the only 

 remedy. Now exhausted pastures are completely restored 

 by an application of bone-dust, which furnishes the phosphate 

 of lime carried off in the milk of the cattle and which their 

 dung could not reproduce. In that section of England so 

 celebrated for dairy-farming, where the Cheshire cheese is 

 produced in such abundance and in such superior quality, it 

 was discovered many years since, that, although the pastures 

 and meadows exhibited their usual verdure, producing largo 

 crops of grass, when fed out to some valuable breeds of cattle, 

 it failed to produce the usual quantity of butter and cheese, 

 although yielding the quantity of milk. On investigating 



