No. 10. 



Lime as a Manure. 



299 



For the Farmers' Cabinet. 

 Lime as a Mannre. 



" Let honour be given to whom honour is due." 



In the 61st number of the American Jour- 

 nal of Science, is a review of Ruffin's Essay 

 on calcareous manures, in which the writer, 

 after complimenting the policy of the founder 

 of Pennsylvania in fixing the agriculturist in 

 the neighbourhood of the merchant and manu- 

 facturer — one consequence of which he as- 

 serts is, that the farmers in the neighbourhood 

 of Philadelphia are the only settlers of the 

 English blood who have resisted the migra- 

 tory habits of other parts of the country — 

 goes on to state, that "a similar dread of 

 change influenced the Germans who followed 

 the Quakers, in the occupation of the more 

 remote districts of Pennsylvania; and while 

 bread stuffs naturally became the only profit- 

 able objects of culture, they avoided the ex- 

 haustion which their growth produced in other 

 districts, by a valuable secret they brought 

 with them from Europe. We call it a secret, 

 for those of other blood who see it used in 

 their presence, do not discover its value. By 

 this simple but efficient aid the farms of 

 Pennsylvania have generally maintained their 

 original character for fertility, and in some 

 places have increased in products beyond the 

 early crops that are given by the proverbial 

 energy of a virgin soil." And " in the United 

 States the use of lime is limited to the dis- 

 tricts in which the descendants of the Ger- 

 mans who settled in Pennsylvania, have in- 

 troduced the method they brought from their 

 native country." 



These sweeping declarations as to who 

 was entitled to tiie honour of first introducing 

 the use of lime as a manure in the United 

 States, and particularly in Pennsylvania, 

 were so contrary to all my impressions and 

 previously formed opinions on the subject, 

 that they strongly arrested my attention on 

 first reading them, and induced a more par- 

 ticular inquiry, which has resulted in the 

 conviction that their correctness is very doubt- 

 ful, or at lea.st that they are stated in a much 

 loo loose and unqualified manner. By the 

 more remote districts of Pennsylvania, we 

 are to understand, I presume, those districts 

 within an hundred miles of Philadelphia ; 

 because it is a well-known fact that the rest 

 of the state, with the exception, perhaps, of 

 some districts in the vicinity of Pittsburg, 

 was either in a wilderness state or in that 

 incipient stage of backwoods cultivation, in 

 which the use of dung, much less of lime, 

 was scarcely known, until the use of lime as 

 a manure had spread to a great extent in the 

 south-eastern part of the state. The parts 

 of the state, then, in which the German popu- 

 lation so far abounded at that epoch, as to 



give a tone to society, or a direction to agri- 

 cultural management, and to which the re- 

 marks of the writer are at all applicable, must 

 be confined to parts of the counties of York, 

 Lancaster, Berks, Northampton, Bucks, Mont- 

 gomery, and Chester. In all these the Ger- 

 mans have, or have had, considerable settle- 

 ments; yet large districts in them are settled, 

 and always have been, by people of other 

 blood. The Germans are a people little given 

 to innovation, but remarkably tenacious of 

 old and long established habits and customs. 

 No people follow in the footsteps of their fore- 

 fathers more implicitly than they do. Hence, 

 if they had once experienced the value of 

 lime as a manure in this country, they would 

 never have abandoned its use. If they really 

 brought the secret of the use of lime as a ma- 

 nure to this from their native country — a fact 

 of which I am somewhat doubtful, as I have 

 never seen any evidence of it — it was most 

 probably lost, as most systems of European 

 management, brought with the first settlers, 

 were — in the new positions they found them- 

 selves in; cultivating a virgin soil teeming 

 with exuberant fertility, where the difficulty 

 was not so much to raise a crop as to dispose 

 of it afterwards: and hence the knowledge of 

 the first settlers was lost to their descendants 

 when the proper time arrived for its applica- 

 tion, and all was to learn over again. Can 

 any one trace the first regular use of lime to 

 them 1 I confess I have not been able to do 

 so. I was many years engaged to some ex- 

 tent in burning and selling lime for agricul- 

 tural and other purposes in the county of 

 Chester, and so far as my knowledge extends, 

 the use of it among them was much less 

 general than with others: they seemed to 

 view it rather with indifference. Among the 

 Germans of Lancaster county the use of lime 

 was by no means general thirty years ago, 

 whatever it may be now, as I know by per- 

 sonal observation ; yet there are the descend- 

 ants of the very Palatines who brought the 

 secret of its use to this country, according to 

 the statements of the author above quoted. 



In the limestone valley of Kishaquohillas, 

 in Mifilin county, a considerable portion of 

 the farmers are of German descent, many of 

 them emigrants from the counties of Chester 

 and Lancaster; yet so little had they done 

 either by precept or example in introducing 

 lime as a manure, that when on a visit there 

 some years ago, many of their neighbours ap- 

 plied to me with eagerness for information on 

 the subject, and evinced by the minuteness 

 of their inqiiiries a total ignorance of the prac- 

 tical part of the business, which could not, or 

 at least need not, have been the case if their 

 German neighbours had fully understood the 

 matter and applied their knowledge to prac- 

 tice. The county of Berks is, and always has 



