218 QUARTERLY JOURNAL. 



upon which it is employed, nor the circumstances under which he has 

 conducted the experiments. He has barely stated a naked fact, 

 and it is left probably wdth others to find out the reason why, 

 under some circumstances, this substance is sometimes useful, and 

 sometimes apparently useless. 



Again, one of the farmers, and perhaps many of them, give their 

 testimony against lime, for they have tried it, and it was with 

 them entirely worthless. We recollect the President of the New- 

 York State Agricultural Society gave his experience on the use of 

 lime. He had employed it both upon a clay soil and upon a sandj 

 soil, and in both instances there was a signal failure, and, in our 

 opinion, this failure in both instances was due to the causes we 

 have already stated. In the clay there is already a sufficiency of 

 lime — in the sandy soil there is a want of organic matter. 



We have made these remarks, not so much on account of the 

 lime, as for the purpose of calling the attention of farmers to the 

 great importance of conducting and reporting their experiments in 

 a systematic way, or in other words, understandingly. Now this 

 cannot be done unless they know something about the composition 

 of the soil. This cannot be done in a way to benefit others unless 

 they state also the controlling circumstances under which a particu- 

 lar experiment has been made. But there is one condition under 

 which experiments have been made, which is most frequently omit- 

 ted ; it is that of the weather, whether the season has been wet or 

 dry, hot or cold. It is unnecessary to dwell a moment upon the 

 importance of noticing these facts, for the most unlearned farmer 

 has learned that the weather influences, above all other conditions, 

 the cultivated crops, and that whatever may be done under unfa- 

 vorable circumstances of temperature and moisture, a crop will fail, 

 at least in part, let him cultivate it in the best possible manner. 



Then, again, the nature of the surface, independent of the com- 

 position of soil, will influence very materially the result of a par- 

 ticular mode of culture. So, also, a particular manure is of excel- 

 lent service to a particular product : but from this it does not fol- 

 low that it will benefit all products. 



In farming, as in medicine, there are no specifics or universal rem- 

 dies. There is no manure which is adapted to every vegetable. 

 Though it is true that carbon forms a large proportion of all vege- 

 tables, yet we may get the carbon in all cases and yet not get the 



