LIME-STONE AND ALLUVIAL SOILS. 65 



beneath and in contact with lime-stone. One thousand grains 

 yielded less than one grain of calcareous earth. 



15. A specimen from within a few yards of the last, but not in 

 contact with lime-stone, contained no calcareous earth ; neither did 

 the red clay sub-soil, six inches below the surface. 



16. Very similar soil, but much deeper, adjoining the principal 

 street of Bedford the specimen taken from eighteen inches below 

 the surface, and adjoining a mass of lime-stone. A very small 

 disengagement of gas indicated the presence of calcareous earth 

 but certainly less than one grain in one thousand, and perhaps not 

 half that quantity. 



17. Alluvial soil on the Juniata, adjoining Bedford. 



18. Alluvial vegetable soil near the stream flowing from all the 

 Saratoga Mineral Springs, and necessarily often covered and soaked 

 by those waters, and 



19. Soil taken from the bed of the same stream neither con- 

 tained any portion of carbonate of lime. 



Thus it appears that of these nineteen specimens of soils, only 

 four contained calcareous earth, and three of these four in exceed- 

 ingly small proportions. It should be remarked that all these 

 were selected from situations which, from their proximity to calca- 

 reous rock, or exposure to calcareous waters, were supposed most 

 likely to present highly calcareous soils. - If five hundred speci- 

 mens had been taken, without choice, even from what are commonly 

 called lime-stone soils (merely because they are not very distant 

 from lime-stone rock, or springs of lime-stone water), the analysis 

 of that whole number would be less likely to show calcareous 

 earth, than the foregoing short list. I therefore feel justified, from 

 my own few examinations, and unsupported by any other authority, 

 to pronounce that calcareous earth will very rarely be found in any 

 soils between the falls of our rivers and the navigable western 

 waters.* In a few specimens of some of the best soils from the 

 borders of the Mississippi and its tributary rivers, I have since 

 found calcareous earth present in all but in very small propor- 

 tions, and in no case exceeding two per cent. 



[When the total deficiency of carbonate of lime, in nearly all the 

 soils of Virginia, was first asserted, as above, in the earliest publi- 

 cation of this essay (1821, in American Farmer, vol. iii.), the 



[* Recent Confirmatory Testimony. Still more strange cases of the total 

 absence of (carbonate of) lime have been stated recently in Johnston's 

 Agricultural Chemistry: " It is a fact which will strike you as not a little 

 remarkable that soils which rest upon chalk, as well as upon other 

 lime-stone rocks, even at the depth of a few inches only, are often, and 

 especially when in a state of. nature, so destitute of lime, that not a parti- 

 cle can be detected in them.'' (p. 377.) The author of course meant the 

 carbonate of lime. 1849.1 

 6* 



