AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENTS. 457 



exhibitions, like this, who have not some time been victims of 

 crude statements. Indeed, it is quite estraordinarv how inany 

 of what are now the prominent subjects, most interesting and 

 most discussed, relating to practical husbandry, remain from 

 year to year open and undecided questions, with about as much 

 said on one side as the other ; when nothing is wanted but 

 trials enough and attention enough to settle them peremptorily. 

 In Massachusetts alone, there are farmers enough at work, if 

 they would continue their observations, to determine any of 

 them in two seasons. Make what allowance you will for that 

 wide margin of uncertainty that always hangs about a business 

 so dependent on seasons and weather, still, I say, Nature, 

 reverentially and resolutely studied, never cheats her disciples. 

 Find her laws, and, rely upon it, they never will miscarry. You 

 have only to talk with your neighbors, or turn over the files of 

 any agricultural journal, to find examples of what I refer to. 

 What universal rules have been established, for instance, as to 

 the mode of applying manures ! Yet why should there not be 

 rules, for all cases, as much as for the silversmith in mingling 

 metals, or the apothecary drugs ? Subsoiling has been preached 

 for some five years past, both here and in England, as the Co- 

 lumbus discovery of modern tillage, revealing to every farmer 

 a new territory underneath his cultivated one ; you are pointed 

 to Lord John Russell's turnips, and the Rackheath wheat. But 

 does the practice actually apply as well to New England as 

 Old ? Is there an offset to its benefits in later crops and more 

 exposure to frost ? What are its relations to under-drainage ? 

 Does it relieve wet lands, or render them more hopelessly 

 soaked and spongy ? Is it equally good for a dry, friable soil 

 on a sand-hill, as I have seen to be true in one case, or is it 

 any better than the common deep ploughing as they practise it 

 in Surrey and some parts of Yorkshire ? Now what I affirm 

 is, that each of these queries ought to have one, definite, indis- 

 putable, experimental answer, recorded where it can be got at; 

 an answer put beyond the region of conjecture, and rooted in 

 authenticated facts. 



Again, of the application of lime, the preconceptions of 

 chemical theory would seem to promise that it belongs only to 

 non-calcareous soils ; yet does not experience show instances 

 58* 



