38 EARTHS AND SOILS. 



or indirectly, the source of our wealth and enjoyments, it 

 merits our particular study and attention. The measure 

 of the blessings which it confers on the human family, is 

 wisely made to depend upon the intelligence, skill, and 

 industry which are employed in its cultivation. If these 

 are properly applied, the reward will be bountiful. If 

 they are neglected, want, vice, and wretchedness will 

 ensue. 



To render his farm-stock profitable, in meat, milk, and 

 wool, every farmer knows he must provide for them an 

 abundance of wholesome food, as he must be aware that 

 it is this food which makes his meat, milk, and wool, and 

 gives the ultimate profits. And he takes care, if he is a 

 good manager, so to economize his food as to yield him 

 the greatest return in these products. We should think 

 him very improvident, who, instead of feeding out roots 

 and forage to his stock, should throw them away, or let 

 them spoil for want of a little care, or permit them to be 

 consumed by his neighbors' stock. 



Let these remarks be applied to our plants. Our 

 farm-crops, like our farm-stock, must be fed, if we would 

 make them profitable to us ; and the former, like the 

 latter, will be profitable precisely in proportion to the 

 food we give them, and the judicious care v/ith which we 

 give it. The vegetable lives and thrives upon animal 

 and vegetable matters, after they have become useless to 

 the animal, and are reduced, by decomposition, to a 

 liquid or gaseous state. Every substance that has once 

 belonged to an animal, has previously been a vegetable ; 

 and every substance that has been a vegetable, whether 

 it be found in a solid, liquid, or aeriform state, is con- 

 vertible into hving plants. So that it is as important, in 

 good farming, to economize dung, or whatever will make 

 dung, and judiciously to feed it to crops, as it is to hus- 

 band well the hay and grain of the farm, destined to feed 

 and fatten the cattle. The soil is the stomach, the re- 

 ceptacle of the food of plants, in which manure is digested, 

 converted into substances that are soluble, that is, capable 

 of being dissolved, by the moisture of the soil ; and of 

 afterwards being absorbed by the minute roots of plants, 



