FERTILIZEKS. 



INTRODUCTION. 



CHEMISTS tell us that water, and this air around us, that 

 we can neither see nor grasp, and which in all our every- 

 day calculations of space we take no account of, make up 

 from eighty-eight to ninety-nine per cent of our crops, our 

 trees, or any form of vegetable growth. Practically, we 

 know this is so ; for we can bring out in a bushel-basket 

 all the ashes made from a load of wood that it might take 

 a couple of yoke of oxen to draw in. A wood cord is about 

 one hundred bushels ; in the ashes which contain the min- 

 erals that entered into the make-up of that wood, we get 

 not more than two per cent of this. The great remainder, 

 after yielding that heat which the sun has fed to it for, it 

 may be, a hundred years, in the form of vapor and gases 

 hurries up the chimney, to return to mother-air, from 

 whence they came. Plant-life builds up the mighty tree, 

 borrowing almost nothing from the soil. It is the weight 

 of the air and the water present in its structure that our 

 oxen strain under when hauling to mill the trunk of some 

 huge veteran of the forest. All that it has taken from 

 the soil to make up its huge bulk the driver might carry 

 in a bag on his shoulder, and then have to go some distance 

 to get an appetite for breakfast. In brief, to express it in 



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