PART II. THE APPLICATION OF SCIENCE TO AGRICULTURE. 



THE MYSTERIES OF MOTHER EARTH. 



It has ever been a mystery how seed go down into the darkness 

 of the earth and come back again in the form of new life. Ages 

 ago this mysterious underworld, with its strange and inexplicable 

 processes, excited the profoundest awe and reverence in the inhab- 

 itants of the world. " The earth is the mother of all, and the stones 

 are her bones," said the ancients. 



Families, tribes, and nations moA^ed about on the surface of the 

 earth and engaged in fierce struggles for the necessities of life, which 

 came from this underworld of the soil. Yet in the soil and subsoil, 

 about which man knows so little even to-day, there is always going 

 on a struggle equally as fierce. This world of darkness is, and ever 

 has been, teeming with life. Roots and rootlets, the great laborers of 

 the plant world, go creeping about through the soil and on down 

 into the subsoil, contending with one another in a perpetual struggle 

 for existence, silent but inexorable. Ever w^orking in and through 

 the very texture of the earth's surface, millions of living things, 

 always busy and always keeping the particles in motion, furnish life 

 for the things that grow above. 



The problem with which the world has been struggling for ages is 

 to establish a harmony between the things that live on the surface and 

 the things that live beneath the surface of mother earth. Man has 

 learned much of the habits of people and the principles of gov- 

 ernment, and of the value of the plant world and the dependence of 

 man upon plants, but little has been learned of this strange world 

 beneath our feet, from which growing plants spring and from which 

 they derive a great part of their sustenance. We do know to-day, 

 however, that there are certain fundamental laws that control the 

 habits of this life of the darkness. 



The world has suffered untold miseries because of its ignorance of 



the soil. Famine, pestilence, and even destructive wars and slavery 



have been some of the results, direct or indirect, of this ignorance, 



during the long centuries through which the race has come. But 



from age to age, these dire calamities have made their visits to man 



and have punished him sorely because of his ignorance and blindness. 



—Selected from Brooks' " Story of Cotton." 



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