46 LIMIT TO IMPROVEMENT OF SOILS. 



porary improvement of the sandy soils would not be attended with 

 more profit or, more properly speaking, with less actual loss. 



It is true that the capacity of a soil for improvement is greatly 

 affected by its texture, shape of the surface, and its supply of 

 moisture. Dry, level, or clay soils, will retain manure longer than 

 the sandy, hilly, or wet. But however important these circum- 

 stances may be, neither the presence nor absence of any of them 

 can cause the essential differences of capacity for improvement. 

 There are some rich and valuable soils with either one or more of 

 all these faults and there are other soils the least capable of re- 

 ceiving improvement, free from objections as to their texture, 

 degree of moisture, or inclination of their surface. Indeed the 

 great body of our poor ridge lands are more free from faults of this 

 kind, than soils of far greater productiveness usually are. Unless 

 then some other and far more powerful obstacle to improvement 

 exists, why should not all our wood-land be highly enriched, by the 

 thousands of crops of leaves which have successively fallen and 

 rotted there? Notwithstanding this vegetable manuring, which 

 infinitely exceeds all that the industry and patience of man can 

 possibly equal, most of our wood-land remains poor ; and this one 

 fact (which at least is indisputable) ought to satisfy all of the 

 impossibility of enriching such soils by putrescent manures only. 

 Some few acres may be highly improved, by receiving all the 

 manure derived from the offal of the whole farm and entire farms, 

 in the neighbourhood of towns, may be kept rich by continually 

 applying large quantities of purchased manures. But no where can 

 a farm be found, which has been improved beyond its original 

 fertility, by means of the vegetable resources of its own arable 

 fields. If this opinion is erroneous, nothing is easier than to prove 

 my mistake, by adducing undoubted examples of such improve- 

 ments having been made. 



But a few remarks will suffice on the capacity for improvement 

 of worn lands, which were originally fertile. With regard to these 

 soils, I have only to concur in the received opinion of their fitness 

 for durable and profitable improvement by putrescent manures. 

 After being exhausted by cultivation, they will recover their pro- 

 ductive power, by merely being left to rest for a sufficient time, 

 and receiving the manure made by nature, of the weeds and other 

 plants that grow and die upon the land. Even if robbed of^the 

 greater part of that supply, by the grazing of animals, a still longer 

 time will serve to obtain the same result. The better a soil was at 

 first, the sooner it will recover by these means, or by artificial 

 manuring. On soils of this kind, the labours of the improving 

 farmer meet with certain success and full reward ; and whenever 

 we hear of remarkable improvements of poor lands by putrescent 



