460 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



and magnesia ; and it rarely fails to contain salts of soda and 

 potash in sensible quantities. Take a gallon of your well water 

 and evaporate it to dryness, and it will not often yield more 

 than a half grain of carbonate of lime ; while a gallon of well 

 water in Monroe County, on our best wheat soils, contains fif- 

 teen grains of carbonate of lime, and ten grains of the sulphate 

 or gypsum. It also contains from five to ten grains of epsom 

 salts, or sulphate of magnesia, several grains of common salt^ 

 particularly on the Onondaga Salt Group, which extend from 

 Madison County through Onondaga, Cayuga, Wayne, Monroe, 

 Orleans, Niagara, and some distance into Canada. It is the 

 various salts which abound in the earths and rocks of Western 

 New York, that impart to its soil unequalled agricultural capa- 

 bilities ', and yet I have analyzed more than a hundred samples 

 of the richest farming lands in that region, and never found 

 over two per cent, of lime in any soil. When you see 100 

 pounds of gypsum applied to an acre, add a ton of clover hay 

 to a crop in a year, although this salt of lime applied as a fer- 

 tilizer, adds only one part in 20,000 to the soil, estimated to 

 the depth of only ten inches, you have demonstrated the great 

 value of a little of " the salt of the earth," where it is really 

 needed. In a like manner, the salts of ammonia, and phos- 

 phates of lime, soda, magnesia and potash, found in guano, de- 

 monstrate, in the most satisfactory manner, the extraordinary 

 power of a very little food of plants in augmenting their growth 

 upon poor land. Under favorable circumstances, 100 pounds 

 of Peruvian guano add from 400 to 600 pounds of merchant- 

 able shelled corn to the crop. To understand how so little 

 manure produces so large a result, we must bear in mind that 

 in 100 pounds of the seeds of maize there are 97 pounds of 

 carbon and the elements of water, and only 3 pounds of the 

 constituents that impart peculiar value to guano. 



It is not because wheat plants extract any considerable 

 amount of lime from the soil that limestone lands are uniformly 

 the best for this grain. A reasonable amount of the calcareous 

 element enables stable manure to produce more than it would 

 without any lime in the soil. This is a curious fact, but I am 

 unable to state the minimum quantity of lime that will suffice 

 for all useful purposes. I am confident that two per cent, is 



