174 



NEW ENGLAND FARMER. 



April 



and harness-maker ; and this one its steam engine. 

 From the nine hundred bushels of wheat, Mr. 

 B. measured off twenty-three hundred bushels of 

 wheat, which sold in Petersburg, Va., for $2,25 per 

 bushel. 



But a word for the character of the country. — 

 Probably no State in the Union can surpass it in 

 its capacities. Not only are there these immense 

 and fertile fields, but almost all the temperate 

 and many tropical fruits flourish there ; the apple, 

 pear, plum, cherry, peach, persimmon, grape, cur- 

 rant, gooseberry, straAviierr}, blackberry, and huckle- 

 berry grow wild, together with which may be culti- 

 vated the fig and ijomegranate, amongst the fruits. 

 In the field crops, we have all the cereals, Indian 

 corn, tobacco, cotton, hemj), flax, indigo, madder, 

 the grasses and several of the root and green crops, 

 and lastly but not least, the sweet potato, that may 

 truly be called the staple of the South. In the 

 mountains are almost every kind of valuable miner- 

 al, and its immense sand plains are covered with 

 the long-leaved pine that gives turpentine, rosin, 

 tar, pitch and yellow pine lumber. 



Every one has heard of the immense herds of 

 hogs that live in the woods here, returning to the 

 owner only when hunted for, or starved out in the 

 winter ; a singular feature of the pine tree, is, that 

 its mast and young roots are a favorite food with 

 hogs upon which they fatten ra])idly,so that the long- 

 leaved pine may be considered the protecting ge- 

 nius of the State, giving as it does shelter, when 

 worked info lumber the materials for ship building, 

 fire in its waste portions, hght by its far-famed 

 light wood knots, and food for the pigs, which in 

 their turn sup])ly the only one thing the pine tree 

 does not, animal food for man. 



The great desideratum here is intelligent white 

 labor ; any intelligent and willing Northerner, eith- 

 er, as farmer or mechanic or tradesman, is sure to 

 succeed if he will but come here and apply the 

 same powers of mind here that he would at home. 



Land can be purchased for three dollars an acre, 

 ■which by simply deep plowing, and the application 

 of a small amount of lime, will yield fifteen to twen- 

 ty bushels of wheat the first year. 



Mr. Burgwyn told me of numerous instances of 

 this sort; instancing one of his own plantations 

 thus ]iurchased for three dollars i)er acre, from which 

 he sold $30 per acre the first year. 



The only danger to be apprehended is, that such 

 men coming here would become slave owners ; for 

 the institution as seen here jiresents no olinoxious 

 i'e&turei', and provides so well for the nnimal happi- 

 ness of the slave, that it necessitates one to contin- 

 ually summon up his principle to resist falling in 

 with and heartily a])])roving the whole system ; but 

 to one who cares nothing about slavery and who is 

 minded to put energy into his action, here lies a 

 certain fortune. 



Excuse the length of this letter ; in future I will 

 be more concise. I remain yours truly, 



R. Morris CorELAND. 



extent, go to pay the British holders of Peruvian 

 government bonds, giving them, to all intents and 

 purposes, a lien upon the profits of a treasure in- 

 trinsically more valuable than the gold mines of 

 California, There are deposits of this unsurpassed 

 fertilizer in some places to the depth of sixty or 

 seventy feet, and over large extents of surface. 



The guano fields are generally conceded to be' the 

 excrement of aquatic fowls, which live and nestle 

 in great numbers around the islands. They seem 

 designed by nature to rescue, at least in part, that 

 untold amount of fertilizing material which every 

 river and brook is rolling into the sea. The Avash 

 of alluvial soils, the floating refuse of the field and 

 forest, and, above all, the wasted materials of great 

 cities, are constantly being carried by the tidal cur- 

 rents out to sea. These, to a certain extent at 

 least, go to nourish directly or indirectly, subma- 

 rine vegetable or animal life, which in turn, goes to 

 feed the birds, which in our day are brought away 

 by the shipload from the Chincha Islands. 



The bird is a beautifully arranged chemical labo- 

 ratory, fitted up to perform a single operation, viz.: 

 to take the fish as food, burn out the carbon by 

 means of its respiratory functions, and deposit the 

 remainder in the shape of an incomparable fertil- 

 izer. But how many ages have these dejiositions 

 of seventy feet in thickness been accumulating?" 



Brief History of Guano. — The London Far- 

 mer's Magazine furnishes the following brief his- 

 tory of guano : — "Guano, as most ])eople under- 

 stand, is imported from the islands of the Pacific — 

 mostly of the Chincha grovip, off the coast of Peru, 

 and under the dominion of that government. Its 

 sale is made a monopoly, and the avails, to a great 



SAVE COAL ASHES. 



Arthur Young, in his valuable Report of the 

 Agricultural Surveys of several European countries, 

 speaks of cases whfere coal ashes were used with 

 great and astonishing success, though the state- 

 ments made to him, he says, were quite discre])ant 

 and contradictory. In one of his articles upon the 

 subject, he remarks : 



"Coal ashes are used from fifty to sixty bushels 

 to the statute acre, for a common dressing ; they 

 succeed well sown on clover in March or April, on 

 dry lands, and do much good applied to sward 

 lands, during any part of the winter or spring. 

 They are never used on wheat. In very dry sea- 

 sons, coal ashes do very little good ; they, as well as 

 most other of those dressings, requiring rain after 

 being sown to set them to work." 



Coal ashes, like the ashes of wood, possess many 

 valuable qualities, and are generally found to ])0s- 

 sess great efficacy on soils which are characterized 

 by a deficiency of alkali. Why the ashes of coal 

 should not be regarded as valuable on wheat lands, 

 is a problem we are wholly unable to solve. No crop 

 is more decidedly improved by alkalescent manures, 

 as a general thing, and as coal, as well as wood 

 ashes, possess certain alkahne properties, as well as 

 other energetic principles, their application to the 

 trop must necessarilj', we think, be productive of 

 advantageous results. 



In the 4th volume of the Farmer, {or 1852, page 

 474, may be found an excellent article by Mr. 

 Stoker, of West Hartford, Conn. His experiments 

 in the use of coal ashes, had surprising results. 

 There is also an article on the subject in the vol- 

 ume for 1853, with an analytical table by Prof. 



