498 AMERICAN HOME GARDEN. 



estimate. It may be very profitable to raise carrots, or egg- 

 plants, or celery near large cities where there is a daily de- 

 mand for them, while the expense of their transportation from 

 a distance, with the attendant risks, would reduce them to the 

 ordinary standard of farm crops. 



A difference of latitude of even less than one degree may 

 occasion an entirely opposite result from the same crop in the 

 same season. Early peas, or potatoes, or fruits, raised thirty 

 or more miles south of a given market, securing the highest 

 price, because maturing at the opening of the season ; while 

 those raised at an equal distance to the north, or such crops 

 of late kinds raised at the South, obtain the lowest price, be- 

 cause coming in when the market is glutted with similar 

 products from more favorable localities. 



The mere money estimate, moreover, may or may not be at 

 all dependent on any intrinsic capacity in the product to sup- 

 port animal life ; even things that are almost utterly destitute 

 of this may become largely profitable, as coffee, from the fact 

 that it furnishes a pleasant beverage ; or as tobacco, which, 

 in its various forms, ministers chiefly, if not entirely, to a vi- 

 tiated taste. 



If the estimate be formed upon the basis of the capacity of 

 the crop to sustain animal life, which really would seem to af- 

 ford some fixed principles as criteria of its intrinsic value, one 

 might suppose that with a little experience in the cultivation 

 of a particular soil, with the gathering and feeding out of its 

 crops, and a little observation of the climate in which we live, 

 it might be safely and pretty accurately made. But not only 

 does the adaptation or non-adaptation of soil and general climate 

 to particular crops modify this estimate of it, but also the char- 

 acter and changes of particular seasons whose current climate 

 may be favorable or unfavorable ; thus hay the growth of a 

 moist, warm, rapid season, is comparatively poor in common 

 phrase, it " does not feed out so well" as that which is raised 

 in a drier and less growthy spring. It is also affected by the 

 course of cropping pursued and the character of the manures 

 applied to the land. All vegetable products show by analysis 

 chemical differences in various lots of the same kinds of crop, 



