2nd March, A. D. 1893. 



ESSAY 



BY 



Dr. homer T. fuller, of Worcester. 

 Theme: — " Origin and Character oj Soils." 



Soils are chiefly derived from rock, — originally from the cooled 

 crust of the globe. They in depth vary from the merest film of dust 

 to several hundred feet. At Lakewood, N. J., in drilling an artesian 

 well, the workmen went down over 700 feet through almost pure sand 

 aud gravel before reaching a stratum of clay thick enough to hold 

 water. Nor did they reach bed-rock even then. This extreme po- 

 rousness of the soil, at that place, making it absorb water almost as 

 rapidly as it can fall, even though it pours in torrents, is what makes 

 that so famous a health resort in winter, excelling for dryness prob- 

 ably any other locality north of Salisbury, N. C, and almost every 

 other north of Florida. On level plateaus in the Southern United 

 States where the soil has been but slightly disturbed, it loosely covers 

 the rock to the depth of from two to twenty feet. In valleys like 

 that of the Mississippi, or of the Nile Delta, the depth is greatly in- 

 creased by the wash of rivers, from one-eighth to one-fourth of an 

 inch in depth being added to Lower Egypt in a single overflow of the 

 swollen river. And yet soils almost as deep as any in the world — 

 perhaps only those of the valleys of the Amazon, the Ganges, and the 

 Yellow River of China being excepted — are found right here in New 

 England and in our own State of Massachusetts. For here a depth 

 of two hundred feet or more is occasionally found, and a depth of forty 

 to sixty feet underlies a considerable portion of Worcester and the 

 surrounding towns. There is solid rock underneath, and around us, 

 but sometimes bare and sometimes very irregularly covered. You 

 dig down sixty feet on Union Street and do not reach it, you climb 

 Belmont Street to the shore of Bell Pond, and northward it towers 

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