62 MONTHLY JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURE. 



vial fertility, its admirable adaptation to the growth of all our cereal products, 

 and its easy and natural accesses to all the best markets, and then at the as- 

 tounding fact that its population is stationary if not retrograde. On this point it 

 were not easy to speak more pointedly than by referring to the testimony of a writer 

 to be found in The Farmers' Library itself, August number of 1846. In ref- 

 erence to this very district of country, for twenty miles, at least, on the Rappa- 

 hannock, below Fredericksburg, he says that within the last twenty years the 

 products have greatly increased. Bare fields, a few years since, have become 

 rich pastures ; the stock of all kinds has improved in blood and character ; dwell- 

 ings and farm-houses have very generally become more suitable for the purposes 

 of their construction ; while some few expensive and beautiful residences have 

 been built, and neat and appropriate churches erected — all indicating an advance- 

 ment in refinement, comfort and morals. By intercourse with their countrymen 

 of other States, which was almost interdicted before the introduction of travel 

 by steam-power, and the extension of knoivledge by agricultural works, he says 

 the lowlanders of Virginia have introduced among them the results of experience 

 elsewhere, and the advantages of a superior kind of farming utensils. In the 

 aggregate, larger crops of grain are probably made in every county of Virginia, 

 than when a former proprietor of " Mount Airy " occasionally sent in one year 

 thirty thousand bushels of wheat to market, which sold at about two dollars per 

 bushel. The estate referred to, he farther says, has been divided into some 

 dozen parts, and one or more parts on an average produces more, some double 

 the quantity that the same parts produced twenty years ago. This increased 

 product, with fewer laborers, he adds, has been produced by the improved modes 

 of Agriculture, chiefly by manures, draining, and suspension of too much grazing. 

 Marl, lime, clover and plaster, have contributed to these results, besides the ju- 

 dicious application of other manures. Such, Sir, is the testimony of a gentle- 

 man "to the manor born," one of the last and the brightest links between all 

 that was and all that is, the best of ours and of the olden time — reared under all 

 advantages to judge and describe that personal opportunity and the highest order 

 of intelligence can give. 



When it is considered how many of the most enterprising sons of the Old Do- 

 minion have moved off to the South-west, carrying with them thousands of the 

 most efficient laborers, the wonder may well be that the maximum of her pro- 

 ductiveness should yet be reaped ; nor can it be accounted for otherwise than on 

 your correspondent's well-grounded assumption of more intelligent and improved 

 modes of culture, and the use of more labor-saving implements and machinery, 

 the more perfect plow, deeper and finer tilth, the threshing-machine, the revolving 

 rake, the cultivator, &c., and by a much more careful husbandry of all resources 

 for barn-yard manure, with a better understanding of the uses and value of the 

 marl everywhere underlying their farms. For these last checks to the progress 

 of exhaustion let Virginia be ever grateful to her Taylors and her RuflSns. Here 

 it was, in Caroline, that Arator himself lived, and breathed over Southern Agri- 

 culture a spirit of revival that will never cease to have eff'ect. He it was who 

 taught his brother farmers the great secret of improvement, for he taught them 

 to think ; and cannot one of his sons, Mr. Editor, be moved to revive, through 

 your pages, for the gratitude and emulation of the present generation of culti- 

 vators, and for the honor of the profession, the fading remembrance of his de- 

 votedness, and very popular contributions to the cause of agricultural improve- 

 ment ? Or is it to be forever that only " through blood and slaughter " men shall 

 ■win their way to the highest honors and the most lasting distinction? 



To comprehend the whole theory and practice of the application of marl, your 

 readers will not need to be referred to the writings of Edmund Ruffin, and espe- 

 cially to his unrivaled Essay on " Calcareous Manures ;" but, for an exhibition of 

 its efficacy in a particular and recent case, precisely in this district, where and of 

 which I am writing, take the following, already once transferred from The Ameri- 

 can Agriculturist to the Richmond Whig. 



THE USE OF MARL NEAR FREDERICKSBURG. 



Lytton Y. Atkins states as follows : 



" The impression has hitherto generally prevailed that the application of marl to poor 

 lands must be limited by the progress of cultivation, aiid that it could not exert much of ita 

 (158) 



