CALCAREOUS MANURES— PRACTICE. jg3 



inisapplied effort, or of positive loss and injury sustained by wrong prac- 

 tice — which the out-lay of a few shillings, and the attentive reading for a 

 few hours, might have effectually guarded them against. And so it still 

 goes on, and will go on, with all who are new beginners and learners, and 

 who have not yet paid each their hundreds or thousands of dollars in loss, 

 in preference to less than as many cents, in both money and labor, in ac- 

 quiring proper instruction, and security from all such loss. 



But with all such enormous drawbacks of loss, which if avoided would 

 have doubled the actually achieved benefits, the extension of marling and 

 liming, and the amount of benefit thence derived and realized in lower Vir- 

 ginia, since 1818, have had no precedent in the annals of agricultural im- 

 provement by any mode of manuring. The following extract from a more 

 general report, recently made by the writer to the State Board of Agricul- 

 ture, will present this branch of the subject in its proper aspect. 



" Marliiig, or manuring from beds of fossil shells. — This mode of fertOiza- 

 tion, now so general through all the marl region of lower Virginia, was 

 not practised except on three or four detached farms, and that to but small 

 extent before 1820. Some few and generally small experimental applica- 

 tions of marl had indeed been made by different individuals, from 15 to as 

 far back as 45 years before ; but which applications, from total misconcep- 

 tion of the true mode of action of calcareous manures, had been deemed 

 failures ; and without exception, of course, had been abandoned by the ex- 

 perimenters as worthless ; and the experiments had been almost forgotten, 

 until again brought to notice, after the much later and fully successful in- 

 troduction of the practice. 



" Henley Taylor and Archer Hankins, two plain and illiterate farmers, and 

 near neighbors in James City county, were the earliest successful and 

 continuing appliers of marl in Virginia. But at what time they began, and 

 which of them was the first, I have not been able to learn, though visiting 

 Mr. Hankins' farm for that purpose, as well as to see his marling, and 

 making inquiries of him personally, in 1833. Mr. Taylor had then been 

 long dead, and his improvements said to be almost lost, by the then occu- 

 pant of his land. Mr. Hankins was unable to say when he and his neighbor 

 began to try marl. He was only certain that it was before 1816. Yet, 

 though these farms are within 12 or 15 miles of Williamsburg, to which 

 place I had made visits once a year or oftener, yet I never heard an intima- 

 tion of their having begun such practice, until some time after my own first 

 trials in 1818. At that time, when led to the use, as I was, altogether by 

 theoretical views, and by reasoning on the supposed constitution of the 

 soil, as well as the known constitution of the manure, it would have been 

 to me the most acceptable and beneficial information to have heard that 

 any other person in Virginia had already proved practically the value of 

 marling. The slow progress of the knowledge of the mere fact of marl 

 having been successfully used before that time, was a strong illustration of 

 the then almost total want of communication among farmers, as well as 

 of their general apathy and ignorance, in regard to the means of improving 

 their lands.* 



" Much earlier than the commencement of marling in James City, the 

 practice had been commenced, (in 1805,) in Talbot county, Maryland, by 

 Mr. Singleton. His account of his practice is in the 4th volume of the 

 'Memoirs of the Philadelphia Agricultural Society,' dated December 31, 

 1817, and first published sometime in 1818. But successful as was his 



* See a more full account at page 108, vol. i., Farmers' Register. 



