52 MANURES. 



A gentleman in Burlington county grew a very superior crop of Indian corn 

 from a certain field; a crop of rye after the Jersey manner immediately fol- 

 lowed it. The same field, the same season, yielded a heavy burthen of clover; 

 and to complete this excessive cropping, exhibited in the fall as large a growth 

 of buckwheat as the neighbourhood had ever seen. This uncommon produc- 

 tiveness was solely the effect of ferruginous marl. Ten years ago, the field 

 was covered with India-grass an uninclosed barren. 



A farm in Monmouth yielded, according to the opinion of an observing 

 neighbour, from ten to twelve bushels of Indian corn per acre. The quantity 

 of grass cut, was limited in the extreme. The free use of marl for twelve 

 years has covered this farm with the richest grasses and from one of its fields 

 the last season, sixty-three bushelsof shelled corn were gathered (to the acre).* 

 This, I apprehend, was as fine c. crop of corn as any ever grown, under the 

 same circumstances, in the United States. It was planted in hills five and a 

 half feet apart, and a considerable portion of the field, for the last twenty years, 

 had not received the benefit of a single shovel of stable manure. The farm 

 has been under tillage nearly a century. Dr. George Holcomb. 



The same volume of the Memoirs contains the testimony of 

 GEORGE CRAFT and PAUL COOPER, both of Gloucester county, 

 in favour of marl as a manure, and detailing the astonishing 

 effects produced by its application; the former entertained so 

 high an opinion of it, from a previous trial, that during the 

 winter of 1814-15, he hauled two hundred loads of it to his 

 place, from a pit situated at a distance of five miles; and in 

 doing so, he was amply compensated. 



Marl is found, as has been before remarked, in various por- 

 tions of our country, but never, we believe, within the limits 

 of Primitive formations, being confined in the "United States, 

 perhaps, exclusively to the Tertiary (or secondary) formations, 

 and the alluvial and deluvial deposits, which lie principally on 

 the seaboard, and are of recent date compared with other forma- 

 tions." Professor ROGERS states, that the shell marls of 

 Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, and the other states still 

 farther south, contain, not unfrequently, as high a per centage 

 of the green-sand as does the sea-beach upon the coast of Mon- 

 mouth county in New Jersey, which he represents in his Re- 

 port as rendering, by its application, the most sterile patches 

 of sandy soil capable of sustaining very admirable crops of 

 corn. That this powerful agent in agriculture is widely dif- 

 fused from the primitive formations of New Jersey, along our 

 southern seaboard, no doubt is now entertained; and all that 

 remains to bring the soil in this immense region, now mostly 

 sterile, having been cropped to death, to the highest grade in 

 the scale of fertility, is a judicious and persevering use of the 



* The marl in this quarter (Mount Pleasant, Monmouth county,) has been 

 known and used as a fertilizer for forty years. It is applied very profusely 

 one hundred loads to the acre, or even more, being no unusual application. 

 The improvement is very permanent, changing the natural growth from In- 

 dian-grass and five-finger, (or cinquefoil,} to fine white clover. White alder, 

 and other plants of rich soils, abound in the marl meadows. Rogers' Geological 

 Survey, 1836, p. 46. 



