16 NATURE STUDY REVIEW [10:1— Jan.. 1914 



tions. Some are turned southward toward the sun, and 

 are outspread in fields that are warm and dry; others face 

 the north, and receive the sun's rays more obliquely, and are 

 shadowy, moist, and cool. Some are exposed to the sweep of 

 the prevailing wintry winds; others are sheltered therefrom. 

 Some are high and dry; others are low and moist. 



Nature has her own crops, suited to each situation; sedges 

 where it is wet; grasses where it is dry; spike-nard in the 

 shade; clovers in the s\m. None of them alone (as we raise 

 plants) nor in rectangular fields, but each commingled with 

 others of like requirements, and each distributed according 

 to conditions of soil, moisture and exposure. One may see 

 how nature disposes them by comparing the life in wet marsh 

 and dry upland; or that of sunny and shaded sides of a 

 wooded glen. 



Under natural conditions the soil of the gentler slopes 

 remains in comparative rest, for it is held together by a net- 

 work of roots of living plants; these never (except under 

 the plow) let go all at once. One dies here and there, now 

 and then, and adds its contribution of himius to the topmost 

 soil layer. Under natural management, the fields are 

 permanently occupied and never exhausted. The richness 

 of the soil is ever increasing. The stirring of the top soil 

 enormously accelerates erosion. Our four-square fields 

 and cross-lot tillage are well enough on the upland and low- 

 land levels where conditions are fairly imiform and the 

 loosened topsoil cannot slip away into the stream; but 

 among the hills, they need to be adapted to suit the condi- 

 tions found on the steeper slopes. To plow a fertile slope in 

 furrows that run up and down its face is to invite the storm 

 waters into prepared channels that they may carry the soil 

 away. Too often the surveyor's lines take no account of the 

 true boundaries of nature's fields, and the plowman knows 

 not the existence of a law of gravity. Many a green hillside, 

 fit to raise permanent crops in perpetuity, has been cleared 

 and plowed and wasted in hardly more time than was neces- 

 sary to kill the roots of the native vegetation. Fortunate 

 is our outlook if the hills round about us are not scarred with 

 fields that bear silent testimony to such abuse — ^fields that are 

 gullied and barren, with their once rich top soil, the patri- 

 mony of the ages washed away,. 



