ON TURNING IN CROPS AS A MANURE. 7T 



most unpiromising circumstances, do live and thrive, is often highly 

 interesting, often truly astonishing, and upon any other principle than 

 that just mentioned, not easy to be accounted for. To this princi- 

 ple, too, may we not safely refer many of those great changes which 

 have often taken place during a long process of cultivation, each suc- 

 cessive year producing some changes, which, being carried forward 

 by the successive crops, at length have resulted in a most entire and 

 important alteration, in consequence of which vegetables and fruits 

 grow with luxuriance, where formerly the greatest labor and atten- 

 tion were required to secure to them even a sickly existence ? 



Plants do more than simply provide for themselves ; they act as 

 it were prospectively, lay up nourishment for those that may come 

 after them. Having seed in themselves, they put up in store for 

 those that are likely to proceed from them. If one crop has been 

 faithfully returned to the earth whence it grew up, the next will com^ 

 into existence with an increased means of food suited to its nourish- 

 ment. And because there is much which is common in the elements 

 on which vegetables subsist, should seed of a different kind from that 

 of the preceding year be used, the coming plant would enter upon the- 

 harvest already gathered to its hand and enjoy the means of a more 

 vigorous growth because served with the stores gathered by a former- 

 generation. Even upon the supposition, credited we believe by most, 

 that a single ingredient necessary to the best development of a par- 

 ticular place may be used up by its long repeated production, it doea 

 not certainly follow that the general means of vegetable life, may not 

 at the same time have been accumulating. Were there no other 

 means then, of increasing the productive power of a given soil than 

 a constant tillage and a restoration in such forms as could best be 

 done of what had been taken from it, no one need doubt but that by 

 a careful and scientific cultivation a wilderness might be turned into 

 a fruitful field. 



Notwithstanding a very general belief of the advantage to be gain- 

 ed by the kind of culture under consideration, and also the evident 

 support which the general laws of the material universe give to it, the 

 Committee are sensibly struck with the fact, that the method has been 

 tried but by comparatively few in the County. The same observation 

 may be extended to the Commonwealth, and indeed to the nation at 

 large, and that even of those who have once or twice triedit and re- 

 ported favorably as to the result, almost none have repeated the ex- 



