380 AMERICAN OPINIONS DERIVED FROM ENGLISH. 



and advantage on high, sandy, gravelly, or mixed lands. Though never so 

 barren, strong clay ground is unsuitable to it; yet if it can be laid dry, 

 marie may be profitable on that also." 



The author then proceeds to direct the mode of application more 

 particularly ; and if there were any doubt as to his total ignorance 

 (or otherwise denial) of calcareous earth being necessary to the 

 constitution of marl, that doubt would be removed by a subsequent 

 sentence. 



" You shall observe (saith Markham,) that if you cannot get dry, per- 

 fect, and rich marie, if then you can get of that earth which is called 

 fuller's earth (and where the one is not, commonly the other is), then you 

 may use it in the same manner as you should do marie, and it is found to 

 be very near as profitable." 



14. Evelyn's Terra, or Philosophical Discourse of Earths, 

 &c.j delivered before the Royal. Society in 1675, has the following 

 passage : 



" Of marie (of a cold sad nature, a substance between clay and chalk), 

 seldom have we such quantities in layers as we have of forementioned 

 earth ; but we commonly meet with it in places affected to it, and it is 

 taken out of pits, at different depths, and of divers colours, red, white, 

 gray, blue, all of them unctuous, and of a slippery nature, and differing in 

 goodness ; for being pure and immixt, it sooner relents after a shower, and 

 when dryed again, slackens, and crumbles into dust, without induration, 

 and growing hard again. They are profitable for barren grounds, as 

 abounding in nitre ; and sometimes there has been found in marie, delfs, a 

 vitriolic wood, which will kindle like coal." 



The opinions expressed in the foregoing extracts, prove suffi- 

 ciently that it was not the ignorant cultivators only, who either did 

 not know of, or attached no importance to the calcareous ingredient 

 in marl; and it was impossible that, from any number of such 

 authors, an American reader could learn that either the object or 

 the effect of marling was to render a soil more calcareous or that 

 our bodies of fossil shells resembled marl in character, or in opera- 

 tion as a manure. Of this, the following quotation from a modern 

 and also an American agriculturist and author, Bordley, will fur- 

 nish striking proof and the more so as he refers frequently to the 

 works of Anderson, and of Young, who treated of marl and of cal- 

 careous manures, in a more scientific and correct manner than had 

 then been usual. This author cannot be justly charged with in- 

 attention to the instruction to be gained from books; for his greatest 

 fault, as an agriculturist, is his fondness for applying the practices 

 of the most improved husbandry of England, to our lands and 

 situations, however different and unsuitable which he carried to 

 an extent that is ridiculous as theory, and would be ruinous to the 

 farmer who should so shape his general practice. 



15. "I farmed in a country [the Eastern Shore of Maryland] where 

 habits are against a due attention to manures : but having read of t3ie ap- 



