390 SELECTIONS FROM ADDRESSES. 



that their supply of nutriment from this source would soon be 

 exhausted ; so too if the air and water around their roots were 

 stagnant, this source of supply must also shortly fail. Animals 

 can walk, or crawl, fly or swim about in order to gather their 

 necessary food. The little pines on a barren soil must wait to 

 have their food brought to them. That it comes, is proved by 

 the liberal crops that grow on poor land. But how is the sur- 

 face of the ground fertilized ? At the first thought, one would 

 say that a young tree gaining in weight from year to year, will 

 consume in its trunk, roots and branches, the little stock of al- 

 kaline salts left in the soil by the cotton or tobacco plants. But 

 instead of this being the fact, the wood of this tree, as you all 

 know, contains next to no potash, and yields a small quantity 

 of ashes when burnt. The leaves, however, which annually 

 fall upon the ground to rot and create a new mould, yield when 

 burnt, four per cent, of ashes. On very light, sandy soils, I 

 have traced the roots of small pine trees eight and ten feet be- 

 low the surface of the earth. In an operation of this kind, it 

 is demonstrated that nature penetrates into a pervious sandy 

 earth, not ten inches but ten feet to obtain the wherewithal 

 to enrich the surface soil. That the leaves of all forest trees 

 do fertilize the ground when they decay upon it, no one doubts. 

 And can it truly be said that there is neither purpose nor wis- 

 dom in this simple arrangement for repairing the damage done 

 to the natural fruitfulness of the earth by one generation of 

 men, for the benefit of coming generations? Man, in the 

 plenitude of his folly and avarice, may smite the bosom of his 

 mother earth with temporary barrenness ; but an all-wise Prov- 

 idence rarely permits the injury to be more than transient. In 

 some parts of eastern Asia, however, there are now naked des- 

 erts where luxuriant harvests once rejoiced the hearts of reap- 

 ers. Ancient cities that extracted all the earthy elements of 

 bread and meat from the soil of the surrounding country, and 

 buried their elements within their walls, or cast them into some 

 river, went to decay as naturally as a swarm of bees dies out, 

 after its little stock of honey is consumed and no more can be 

 gathered. 



The agricultural literature of the Carthagenians and Romans 



