A TREATISE ON THE CONNECf ION < 



the surface or soil of all countries would, in process of 

 time, have become barren and unfertile. On the whole, 

 there can be -little risque in. asserting, that the quantity 

 of vegetable matter in soils under a proper system of 

 cultivation and dunging, is, notwithstanding, the -above 

 abstractions, probably on the increase. The great quan- 

 tity of saccharine and other matter yearly taken away^ 

 without being returned to the soil, and the unfitness of 

 the hard or woody part of the sugar-cane for the food of 

 cattle, evidently prove that the sugar plantations must 

 suffer annually a considerable degree of cjeterioralion -, and 

 that from so great an abstraction, as well as from the 

 process of oxygenation, the soil must at length cease to 

 produce crops of sugar. Such effects have in part been 

 already experienced in Barbadoes, and in the Islands first 

 settled and cultivated. 



It is apprehended, that the less productive power of the 

 soil of some of these islands, is more to be ascribed to 

 the state in which the vegetable matter is now in, than 

 to its having been exhausted by cropping. Should this 

 conjecture prove well founded, and that the soil still con- 

 tain a large proportion of oxygenated vegetable matter, 



the 



