22 AMERICAN HUSBANDRY. 



II. DRAINING. 



Few improvements of modern date are likely to 

 become more beneficial to the northern section of 

 the union than systematic draining. In the first 

 place, it will reclaim and render highly productive 

 large tracts of land, which are now unproductive of 

 anything useful, by reason of the water which con- 

 stantly covers or saturates them. In the next place, 

 it will improve the lands that are wet, and render 

 them far more manageable and productive in grain, 

 roots, and the more nutritious grasses, by carrying 

 off the superfluous water. When there is an excess 

 of moisture in the soil, ploughing can be only imper- 

 fectly performed, and not until late in spring : the 

 benefit of manure is thereby lost, and the cultivated 

 crop is light, and more subject to vernal and autum- 

 nal frosts than it would be if the land were laid dry. 



The soil, in regard to vegetable nutrition, may be 

 compared to the animal stomach, which digests ; and 

 the spongeoles or rootlets of the plant, to the lac- 

 teals of the animal, which absorb, and take up, and 

 propel the digested food to the elaborating organs 

 (the lungs in the one and the leaves in the other), 

 where this food undergoes its last preparation, and 

 is fitted to become a part of the organic matter of 

 the animal or vegetable. We all know that when 

 the animal stomach is from any cause out of order, 

 so that the food taken into it is not properly digest- 

 ed, the subsequent processes of nutrition are arrest- 

 ed ; and if the cause be not removed, the animal sick- 

 ens, and ultimately dies. So with the soil. If the 

 vegetable matter deposited there to feed the crop be 

 not decomposed or rotted, and resolved into a liquid 

 or gaseous form, so that it can be taken up by the 

 spongeoles, the plant will become sickly and unpro- 

 ductive, and the processes of healthy nutrition be at 

 a stand. Hence the accumulation of vegetable mat- 

 ters in swamps, marshes, and other localities habitu- 



