SOILS OP ANCIENT ALLUVIUM. 231 



qualities, though with considerable variations of texture and 

 fertility. Such were the natural soils, generally, of the farms of 

 Sandy Point, Brandon, Wyanoke, Westover, Eppes' Island, Jor- 

 dan's Point, Shirley, Curie's Neck, and smaller parts of many 

 other lands along James river. Some small portions, as on 

 Wyanoke, we're so sandy as to suffer loss of soil from high winds, 

 before being improved by lime, which stopped the further progress 

 of that injury. Other parts are made objectionably stiff and in- 

 tractible, by containing too much clay. More generally, the 

 texture is of, or approaches to medium, or is between the extremes 

 of sandy loam and clayey loam. The surface is nearly level, but 

 generally is very slightly undulating, and exhibiting, in the direc- 

 tion of the depressions and elevations, the course and degree of 

 violence of the ancient flood of turbid water, which deposited the 

 soil, and also thus furrowed the surface. All such lands were 

 originally rich, and of course neutral; but nearly all had been 

 much reduced in fertility by the exhausting and bad cultivation 

 formerly general in lower Virginia. A large proportion of these 

 lands were of that peculiar and best kind of soil known as "mu- 

 latto," or chocolate-coloured. They are reddish brown, showing by 

 this colour a considerable ingredient of red oxide of iron ; while the 

 darker tint, friable texture, and growth of these soils, would seem 

 to indicate a calcareous character and constitution formerly, though 

 none have been known to be more than neutral, before the artificial 

 calxing. Before this improvement on all the best of such soils, 

 clover would grow, and gypsum acted on clover. These "mulatto" 

 soils have before been incidentally mentioned in this essay ; and 

 more particular descriptions of several of the best tracts, and of 

 their recent improvement by calxing, were published in different 

 parts of the Farmers' Register.* 



Reasoning from the modes of operation ascribed to calcareous 

 earth in Chap. VIII., and in advance of all experience of the effects 

 of calcareous manures on these fine neutral soils, I had not sup- 

 posed them capable of deriving much benefit from that mode of 

 improvement. But very different have been the results. The 

 effects of calxing thereon, whether by marling or liming, are (as 

 was expected), scarcely, if at all, perceptible on the first crop ; 

 and even the earliest appreciable benefit is as nothing compared to 

 the speedy and wonderful effects on acid soils. Still, the improve- 

 ment is not long in becoming manifest; and within the first round 

 of the rotation of crops, and especially when clover becomes the 

 growth of the field, the benefit from the previous calxing is great, 

 and in the succeeding grain crops is amply remunerating, though 



* As of Lower Wyanoke, Shirley, and Curie's Neck, in vol. i. ; Westover, 

 in vol. i. ; Sandy Point, in vol. ix. ; Brandon, in vol. x. ; besides many 

 other slighter references to these or other similar lands. 



