150 Extracts from the Journals. [Jan., 



In our experience, we have known art to commit some most 

 egregious errors, in regard to the character of soil. On one oc- 

 casion a farmer, guided by art, who despised most heartily all 

 science and book-knowledge on agriculture, came in possession of 

 an extensive tract of peat-marsh. Art at once concluded from 

 blackness and depth of the soil, that if the bushes and surplus 

 water could be disposed of, a most exuberant crop of Indian corn 

 might be obtained. Accordingly the mattock, spade and scythe 

 were put in requisition, and after much labor and expense had 

 been employed, several acres were brought into a condition in 

 which the farmer and his sons could drag a plow by dint of hard 

 pulling through the surface soil, the subsoil still remaining too 

 miry to bear up a yoke of oxen. This was cheerfully borne by 

 the farmer, in anticipation of the crop of golden ears with which 

 his toils were to be rewarded at the close of the season. His, 

 alas! like too many of man's golden dreams, were never realized. 



The spring was warm and propitious for his labors; the seed 

 was planted; it vegetated and continued to grow while the ver- 

 nal showers and dews were abundant and a sufficient quantity of 

 soluble nutrition was yet unexpended on the surface of the peat. 

 But with the approach of the scorching summer's sun, the moisture 

 was evaporated even below the roots of the corn, and the stalks 

 withered without attaining a height of more than two feet. Mis- 

 fortunes are said not to come singly. They certainly did not in 

 this instance; for at the time the corn was perishing, from a de- 

 ficiency of nutrition, the farmer put fire to some piles of brush on 

 the margin of the field, which communicated with the sun-dried 

 peat. This continued to burn for several months, nearly suffocat- 

 ing the population of the surrounding country, and ultimately 

 leaving extensive excavations in the marsh that have since filled 

 with water and become the habitation of reptiles innumerable. 



What more successful course, it may be asked, would the scien- 

 tific farmer have taken with this steril bog. 



As a botanist, he would have recognised the accumulation of 

 muck to be made up, principally of a living moss — a species of 

 sphagnum, which is growing from year to year. 



As an agricultural chemist, he would have discovered by analy- 

 sis that though it contains a very large proportion — from seventy 

 to ninety per cent of three of the ultimate elements of the or- 

 ganized tissues that make up the structure of vegetables, to wit, 

 carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, yet combined and organized, and 

 under the control of the living vegetable principle {vitality), they 

 are not in a condition in which other living vegetables can appro- 

 priate them to the purposes of nutrition and support. 



As well might the growing corn seize upon the purslain and 

 other noxious weeds in a living state, and employ their proximate 



