resources wholly unknown to the farmers of our time ? Having an excellent market at 

 your very doors for all that your best skill and industry can produce, you seem to have 

 the strongest incentives'^to improve your farms, and double their products. To do this 

 in the most economical way, allow me to suggest that you- ought to study the latent 

 powers of naturally poor soils for the cheap production of grass and grain. Suppose I 

 were to investigate a fair sample of the arated soil of this county, and compare it with 

 the soil in Western New York which produces the largest crops grown in the United 

 States. What, think you, would be the essential difference between the two ? It may 

 be presuraplious in me to hazard an opinion on so important a question, on general 

 principles, without a special examination of the land in this region. But you have the 

 old red sand-stone here precisely as it is found in the District of Columbia ; you have 

 soft water here as it is there, and your land here, as it is there, is better adapted to corn 

 than wheat. During the last six years I have had ample opportunities for the critical 

 study of the free-stone and granitic soils of the South, as I had previously to investigate 

 the lime-stone soils of Western New York. When rain water passes through the latter 

 and appears in wells and springs, it is uniformly charged with salts of lime and mag- 

 nesia, and rarely fails to contain salts of soda and potash in sensible quantities. Take 

 a gallon of your well water and evaporate it to dryness, and it will not often yield more 

 than a half grain of the carbonate of lime ; while a gallon of the well water of Monroe 

 county on our best wheat soils contains fifteen grains of carbonate of lime, and ten 

 grains of the sulphate, or gypsum. It also contains from five to ten grains of Epsom 

 salts, or sulphate of magnesia ; several grains of common salt, particularly on the 

 Onondaga salt group, which extend from Madison county through Onondaga, Cayuga, 

 Wayne, Monroe, Orleans, and Niagara into Canada. It is the various salts which 

 abound in the rocks of Western New York that impart to its soil unequaled agricultural 

 capabilities ; and yet, I haVe analysed more than a hundred samples of the richest farm- 

 ing lands in that region, and never found over two per cent, of lime in any soil. When 

 you see 100 pounds of gypsum applied to an acre, add a ton of clover hay to the crop, 

 although this salt of lime applied as a fertilizer adds only one part in twenty thousand 

 to the soil, estimated to the depth of only ten inches, you have demonstrated the great 

 value of a little of " the salt of the earth," where it is really needed. In a like man- 

 ner, the salts of ammonia, and phosphates of lime, soda, magnesia, and potash found in 

 guano, demonstrate in the most satisfectory manner the extraordinary power of a very 

 little food of plants in augmenting to their growth on poor land. Under favorable cir- 

 cumstances, 100 pounds of Peruvian guano add from 400 to 600 pounds of merchanta- 

 ble shelled corn to the crop. To understand how so little manure produces so large 

 a result, we must bear in mind that in 100 pounds of the seeds of maize there are 97 

 pounds of carbon and the elements of water, and only three pounds of the constituents 

 that impart peculiar value to guano. It is not because wheat plants extract any con- 

 siderable amount of lime from the soil, that limestone lands are uniformly the best for 

 this orain. A reasonable amount of the calcareous element enables stable manure to 

 produce more than it would without any lime m the soil. This is a curious fact, but I 

 am unable to state the minimum quantity of the carbonate of lime that will suffice for 

 all useful purposes. I am confident that two per cent, is the maximum quantity 

 needed to grow wheat under the most favorable auspices ; but whether one part in 100, 

 or one in 500, or 1000, will answer equally well, I have never been able to satisfy 

 myself. All farming lands that yield soft well and spring water need lime ; and they 

 very often lack other ingi-edients quite as much, which the application of lime will 



not supply. 



7b be oontinued. 



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